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The overlap between people who love Haskell and people who love Nix is huge, yet Nix has no static typing! Sure, people recognize that a good static type syste

by mbrock 9y ago

The overlap between people who love Haskell and people who love Nix is huge, yet Nix has no static typing! Sure, people recognize that a good static type system could improve Nix, but they also recognize that making such a thing isn't easy and that advanced type systems steepen language learning curves. I just try to counter the meme that people have to take a side and can't simultaneously appreciate very different languages. :)

kreetx 9y ago
It's a good discussion! I think it's more about where are we coming from and where are we going. I have no nix experience (but know bits from reading stuff on the internet :-), but maybe the pro-nix attitude among haskellers is from a few factors: (1) referentially transparent definitions, and (2) it's better than things that have come before. I.e even with other devops/deployment scripting tools nix adds new value, and is in this sense "on it's way somewhere" (perhaps haskellization, but we'll see). So the nix people might move to the typed version when that happens. But for languages the typed ones are already here, and have been for quite some time. So if one has stuck around with javascript then my question is why (apart from the practicality reasons).
- mbrock 9y ago
  Yeah, agreed. JavaScript doesn't really have any impressive redeeming features. I like it because it's kind of minimally viable and accidentally really useful for dealing with APIs full of duck typed nested records. It's really hard to be both minimally viable and have a sound and expressive static type system. Simply typed lambda calculus isn't even Turing complete, and the fate of Haskell's endless extensions indicates an inherent rabbit hole... Haskell itself has somewhat horrible issues dealing with extensible records, and the solutions are all complex and hard to understand. Dealing with JSON in Haskell in a quick and easy way is nowadays quite nice, but it took the invention of van Laarhoven lenses and the aeson-lens module... I greatly prefer JavaScript to Java because I prefer no static type checking over inexpressive static type checking! And expressive type systems are hard to get right, so it's a very classic "worse is better" situation.

by mbrock 9y ago

kreetx 9y ago

It's a good discussion! I think it's more about where are we coming from and where are we going. I have no nix experience (but know bits from reading stuff on the internet :-), but maybe the pro-nix attitude among haskellers is from a few factors: (1) referentially transparent definitions, and (2) it's better than things that have come before. I.e even with other devops/deployment scripting tools nix adds new value, and is in this sense "on it's way somewhere" (perhaps haskellization, but we'll see). So the nix people might move to the typed version when that happens. But for languages the typed ones are already here, and have been for quite some time. So if one has stuck around with javascript then my question is why (apart from the practicality reasons).

mbrock 9y ago
Yeah, agreed. JavaScript doesn't really have any impressive redeeming features. I like it because it's kind of minimally viable and accidentally really useful for dealing with APIs full of duck typed nested records. It's really hard to be both minimally viable and have a sound and expressive static type system. Simply typed lambda calculus isn't even Turing complete, and the fate of Haskell's endless extensions indicates an inherent rabbit hole... Haskell itself has somewhat horrible issues dealing with extensible records, and the solutions are all complex and hard to understand. Dealing with JSON in Haskell in a quick and easy way is nowadays quite nice, but it took the invention of van Laarhoven lenses and the aeson-lens module... I greatly prefer JavaScript to Java because I prefer no static type checking over inexpressive static type checking! And expressive type systems are hard to get right, so it's a very classic "worse is better" situation.