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...And I never grew to like Haskell. The syntax makes all of your programs look very elegant, but there are no clear delimiters. The syntax for how functions ar

...And I never grew to like Haskell. The syntax makes all of your programs look very elegant, but there are no clear delimiters. The syntax for how functions are delimited isn't clearly explained by most sources. And I don't want to type my code and just hope that the magical compiler fairies deduce my meaning. That kind of programming attracts bugs like a man covered in honey.

gnufx 10y ago
I don't know what that means, but if the objection is to layout ("the off-side rule"), that's just an alternative to the braces and semi-colons that you'd typically use if it was machine-generated, for instance.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  The objection isn't so much to the layout, as it is to the fact that I can't find any documentation as to what the layout is and how the compiler interprets it.
  - eru 10y ago
    Interesting. I've never bothered to look up the formal specs, but it was never a problem that lead to an ambiguous interpretation of my programs. (I sometimes write programs that the compiler doesn't like. But seldom once that the compiler interprets different from me.) I usually give types for my top level functions. It's good documentation, and also prevents most of these kind of issues. (For a similar example, human mistakes with operator precedence usually lead to compile-time type errors in Haskell, seldom to runtime problems like in C or C++.)
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      It's not a huge problem, but lack of understanding of how the compiler delineates blocks of code makes the code hard to reason about. I like to know what the compiler will do with my code, and what is and isn't valid through something other than trial and error. Scheme's perfect regularity makes that easy. Haskell... doesn't. I am aware that the information exists somewhere, and I think I got a link a bit back, so I'll have to go track that down. But it is absolutely baffling that people don't discuss it more. Would you be able to write Python if nobody told you about the indentation rules? Of course not. I'll have to find that link...
eru 10y ago
> And I don't want to type my code and just hope that the magical compiler fairies deduce my meaning. That kind of programming attracts bugs like a man covered in honey. I wrote plenty of Haskell commercially (and for fun). Not once did we run into that problem.

gnufx 10y ago

I don't know what that means, but if the objection is to layout ("the off-side rule"), that's just an alternative to the braces and semi-colons that you'd typically use if it was machine-generated, for instance.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago
The objection isn't so much to the layout, as it is to the fact that I can't find any documentation as to what the layout is and how the compiler interprets it.
- eru 10y ago
  Interesting. I've never bothered to look up the formal specs, but it was never a problem that lead to an ambiguous interpretation of my programs. (I sometimes write programs that the compiler doesn't like. But seldom once that the compiler interprets different from me.) I usually give types for my top level functions. It's good documentation, and also prevents most of these kind of issues. (For a similar example, human mistakes with operator precedence usually lead to compile-time type errors in Haskell, seldom to runtime problems like in C or C++.)
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    It's not a huge problem, but lack of understanding of how the compiler delineates blocks of code makes the code hard to reason about. I like to know what the compiler will do with my code, and what is and isn't valid through something other than trial and error. Scheme's perfect regularity makes that easy. Haskell... doesn't. I am aware that the information exists somewhere, and I think I got a link a bit back, so I'll have to go track that down. But it is absolutely baffling that people don't discuss it more. Would you be able to write Python if nobody told you about the indentation rules? Of course not. I'll have to find that link...

eru 10y ago

> And I don't want to type my code and just hope that the magical compiler fairies deduce my meaning. That kind of programming attracts bugs like a man covered in honey. I wrote plenty of Haskell commercially (and for fun). Not once did we run into that problem.