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When I look at a programming language, I look at the community and how it gets stuff done and projects that are noteworthy. Something about Haskell strikes me

When I look at a programming language, I look at the community and how it gets stuff done and projects that are noteworthy. Something about Haskell strikes me as different. Despite the buzz about it, I don't see many projects for it other than shellcheck, pandoc and xmonad, and for two of those, there's better solutions around (sphinx, awesome/i3). The other thing is the general flow I've see with Haskell programmers, many really tie down their identity do it. They see programming as a crossword puzzle for them to solve in short term, not as something other programmers have to read later on. They're not very empathetic to the idea the runways dwindling and you have to ship sooner rather than later. In addition, I found that the Scala / Haskell developers I knew took golang to be quite the nuisance. They find gophers pesky. I think the reason why is years of Haskell teaches them to overengineer and complicate things needlessly. It's frustrating because they're not aware of it themselves and take offense, even blame you when you point it out to them. Maybe I've just been unlucky. In 10 years, I've never had people who consistently failed to ship, been mean and arrogant as scala / haskell programmers. They take the slight criticism as an assault on their identity.

59nadir 10y ago
> Despite the buzz about it, I don't see many projects for it other than shellcheck, pandoc and xmonad, and for two of those, there's better solutions around (sphinx, awesome/i3) I tried awesome for two weeks and had one crash. I've run XMonad for 5+ years and had no crashes. Just because they are supposed to accomplish the same things does not mean that they're equal. One is better and it's because of the choice of language. It's very hard to take your post seriously when you include something like this in it and you don't bother to qualify it even in the slightest.
- gothrowaway 10y ago
  > One is better and it's because of the choice of language. > It's very hard to take your post seriously when you include something like this in it and you don't bother to qualify it even in the slightest. I looked in your history and yup, you are partial to Haskell. Why do you feel a need to immediately judge. Why did you say "hard to take seriously". Why didn't you just ask politely for more details? In my opinion, you already had your mind made up. Just like the blog poster did. > I tried awesome for two weeks and had one crash. I've run XMonad for 5+ years and had no crashes. That's your personal anecdote. There's no evidence that the language could have prevented the crash. And that doesn't make the window manager "better", which is subjective. What are more people using? Awesome and i3. Primarily because they don't want to deal with Haskell when they could be doing lua or a simple config.
  - 59nadir 10y ago
    > I looked in your history and yup, you are partial to Haskell. It's convenient that you have no post history to go through, since you decided that the nonsense you're posting shouldn't be tied to your real account. Your bias is astounding, yet you go for the "your mind was already made up" card. I like Haskell but by no means am I tied to any single language and I'm not the one making posts about how all the users of a language seem to have undesirable traits. Even better, you then criticize using "personal anecdotes", when that's exactly what you did in order to condemn the users of two languages. You half-dampen it by saying "Maybe I'm just unlucky", but the entire point of your post is "these two communities suck". > That's your personal anecdote. There's no evidence that the language could have prevented the crash. Any ML-family compiler will catch more crap at compile time than any C compiler. Adding lua on top will not solve any of that. None of that is opinion. It's just how the languages are designed and how they use types. Adding automatic memory management to that makes the gap even wider and in short, that stops the vast majority of crashes that you can get. C + lua is great for lots of things, but everything is a tradeoff and here the tradeoff is that you're very likely to get crashes. Good intentions alone can't prevent segfaults and most C software is proof of that.
    - gothrowaway 10y ago
      If it were node.js, I highly doubt I'd have a person coming out of the woodwork with cleverly placed quotes as if it's a legal threat. Then blaming me for being biased as if you don't already have a conclusion derived. This is the behavior I experienced - to me, this feels like projection and trying to bully me into silencing what I truly witnessed. It really bothers me and makes me uncomfortable. I'm just stating my experiences. You wanna know why I use a throwaway? Because people bully and bludgeon anyone who doesn't praise Haskell and / or Scala. And it's been unique to those language communities. At the end of the day, your reaction is predictable. I'm not reading too deeply into what you say because, like my prior experiences, I think you have your mind up, and in spite or proof given, you're going to be on the defense / offense. > Any ML-family compiler will catch more crap at compile time than any C compiler... None of these things about language mattered since awesome and i3 had language as an afterthought and focused on experience. xmonad literally has haskell mentioned as a feature, the token battlestation pic (which is pretty cool) even has a haskell book next to it. Xmonad even uses haskell for the configuration of it. Look, not trying to take a jab at hobbyists. It's just I'm saying, in my experience, I found Haskell and scala "hobbyists" to be quite mean and it hurt my feelings alot, especially when I dropped, far more politely than when they ever spoke to me, the news they're not focused on business goals and work product and just refactoring stuff over and over. They kind of failed at bringing product vision to light, even basic things like defining requirements felt beneath them. Again, maybe I've just been unlucky.
- CJefferson 10y ago
  On the other side, I used XMonad for a while and it crashed frequently. I did submit a bug report and it did get fixed, but there was another crash I couldn't be bothered to try to track down, and just switched back to the standard ubuntu shell.
  - 59nadir 10y ago
    > I did submit a bug report and it did get fixed, but there was another crash I couldn't be bothered to try to track down, and just switched back to the standard ubuntu shell. Interesting. What was the bug, if I may ask? Do you have a URL for it and the resolution to it? What do you mean, you "switched back to the standard Ubuntu shell", exactly? XMonad is a window manager, it has nothing to do with shells. On top of that, do you mean you switched back to bash, which is the standard shell of most distros, or do you really mean you switched to the standard Ubuntu terminal emulator? There are a few things that need clarification, as what you've said doesn't make much sense in the context of window managers.
    - CJefferson 10y ago
      By shell, I mean window manager. I'll try and look up the bug.
kod 10y ago
In over 10 years the most productive people I've worked with were able to learn Scala and ship code in Scala quickly, without worrying about whether they would rather be programming Haskell.
- mafribe 10y ago
  The best programmers I've met created ML, Scala and Haskell.
runeks 10y ago
Here's a snippet from #haskell which doesn't agree with your assessment: https://gist.github.com/quchen/5280339 https://gist.github.com/quchen/5280339
tasuki 10y ago
Have you heard about the Blub paradox? http://wiki.c2.com/?BlubParadox http://wiki.c2.com/?BlubParadox

59nadir 10y ago

> Despite the buzz about it, I don't see many projects for it other than shellcheck, pandoc and xmonad, and for two of those, there's better solutions around (sphinx, awesome/i3) I tried awesome for two weeks and had one crash. I've run XMonad for 5+ years and had no crashes. Just because they are supposed to accomplish the same things does not mean that they're equal. One is better and it's because of the choice of language. It's very hard to take your post seriously when you include something like this in it and you don't bother to qualify it even in the slightest.

gothrowaway 10y ago
> One is better and it's because of the choice of language. > It's very hard to take your post seriously when you include something like this in it and you don't bother to qualify it even in the slightest. I looked in your history and yup, you are partial to Haskell. Why do you feel a need to immediately judge. Why did you say "hard to take seriously". Why didn't you just ask politely for more details? In my opinion, you already had your mind made up. Just like the blog poster did. > I tried awesome for two weeks and had one crash. I've run XMonad for 5+ years and had no crashes. That's your personal anecdote. There's no evidence that the language could have prevented the crash. And that doesn't make the window manager "better", which is subjective. What are more people using? Awesome and i3. Primarily because they don't want to deal with Haskell when they could be doing lua or a simple config.
- 59nadir 10y ago
  > I looked in your history and yup, you are partial to Haskell. It's convenient that you have no post history to go through, since you decided that the nonsense you're posting shouldn't be tied to your real account. Your bias is astounding, yet you go for the "your mind was already made up" card. I like Haskell but by no means am I tied to any single language and I'm not the one making posts about how all the users of a language seem to have undesirable traits. Even better, you then criticize using "personal anecdotes", when that's exactly what you did in order to condemn the users of two languages. You half-dampen it by saying "Maybe I'm just unlucky", but the entire point of your post is "these two communities suck". > That's your personal anecdote. There's no evidence that the language could have prevented the crash. Any ML-family compiler will catch more crap at compile time than any C compiler. Adding lua on top will not solve any of that. None of that is opinion. It's just how the languages are designed and how they use types. Adding automatic memory management to that makes the gap even wider and in short, that stops the vast majority of crashes that you can get. C + lua is great for lots of things, but everything is a tradeoff and here the tradeoff is that you're very likely to get crashes. Good intentions alone can't prevent segfaults and most C software is proof of that.
  - gothrowaway 10y ago
    If it were node.js, I highly doubt I'd have a person coming out of the woodwork with cleverly placed quotes as if it's a legal threat. Then blaming me for being biased as if you don't already have a conclusion derived. This is the behavior I experienced - to me, this feels like projection and trying to bully me into silencing what I truly witnessed. It really bothers me and makes me uncomfortable. I'm just stating my experiences. You wanna know why I use a throwaway? Because people bully and bludgeon anyone who doesn't praise Haskell and / or Scala. And it's been unique to those language communities. At the end of the day, your reaction is predictable. I'm not reading too deeply into what you say because, like my prior experiences, I think you have your mind up, and in spite or proof given, you're going to be on the defense / offense. > Any ML-family compiler will catch more crap at compile time than any C compiler... None of these things about language mattered since awesome and i3 had language as an afterthought and focused on experience. xmonad literally has haskell mentioned as a feature, the token battlestation pic (which is pretty cool) even has a haskell book next to it. Xmonad even uses haskell for the configuration of it. Look, not trying to take a jab at hobbyists. It's just I'm saying, in my experience, I found Haskell and scala "hobbyists" to be quite mean and it hurt my feelings alot, especially when I dropped, far more politely than when they ever spoke to me, the news they're not focused on business goals and work product and just refactoring stuff over and over. They kind of failed at bringing product vision to light, even basic things like defining requirements felt beneath them. Again, maybe I've just been unlucky.
CJefferson 10y ago
On the other side, I used XMonad for a while and it crashed frequently. I did submit a bug report and it did get fixed, but there was another crash I couldn't be bothered to try to track down, and just switched back to the standard ubuntu shell.
- 59nadir 10y ago
  > I did submit a bug report and it did get fixed, but there was another crash I couldn't be bothered to try to track down, and just switched back to the standard ubuntu shell. Interesting. What was the bug, if I may ask? Do you have a URL for it and the resolution to it? What do you mean, you "switched back to the standard Ubuntu shell", exactly? XMonad is a window manager, it has nothing to do with shells. On top of that, do you mean you switched back to bash, which is the standard shell of most distros, or do you really mean you switched to the standard Ubuntu terminal emulator? There are a few things that need clarification, as what you've said doesn't make much sense in the context of window managers.
  - CJefferson 10y ago
    By shell, I mean window manager. I'll try and look up the bug.

kod 10y ago

In over 10 years the most productive people I've worked with were able to learn Scala and ship code in Scala quickly, without worrying about whether they would rather be programming Haskell.

mafribe 10y ago
The best programmers I've met created ML, Scala and Haskell.

runeks 10y ago

Here's a snippet from #haskell which doesn't agree with your assessment: https://gist.github.com/quchen/5280339 https://gist.github.com/quchen/5280339

tasuki 10y ago

Have you heard about the Blub paradox? http://wiki.c2.com/?BlubParadox http://wiki.c2.com/?BlubParadox