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As someone who really likes Haskell, I've found the response to the talk from Haskellers, like in that thread, really disappointing. The common refrains indicat

by carljv 9y ago

As someone who really likes Haskell, I've found the response to the talk from Haskellers, like in that thread, really disappointing. The common refrains indicating that Rich doesn't understand Haskell, types, etc. are patronizing and likely incorrect. (I realize he's trying to hit a few targets, from C++ to Java to Haskell in one go, so it's not always clear which he's complaining about.) The other response I see is that if he were only aware of feature X (mostly row polymorphism), then that solves his issue. Often feature X is some immature Haskell extension, or exists in research or still niche languages. I don't think switching to Purescript is going to solve more than one of his issues, if even that. And the last thing I've seen is a bunch of folks trying to torture the crap out of Map to prove him wrong (not really) about some offhand point or another. By and large I've seen a lot of (pedantic) sniping at specific phrasings without much attempt to grapple with the larger points. The casual dismissiveness of users of dynamic languages (programmers use them because "dynamic types are easy" says one commenter -- about a talk from a guy who has famously thoroughly dissected the notion of "easy.") along with the inability to actually engage with the broader ideas has kinda turned me off the Haskell community. Lastly, it seemed clear to me from the video and transcript that he was saying performance optimization, not (just) Intellisense, is a clear win for static over dynamic types. And "Intellisense" is kinda just a shorthand for static analysis generally. Again, the point is not that types don't have benefits, its that those benefits come with costs. I think Haskellers often underplay the costs associated w/ dealing with the type system, underestimate how little reach the type system has in an open system where data's flying around arbitrary services, and overstate how much preventing internal inconsistency bugs solves all problems. I like Haskell, OCaml, F#, etc. I think they make a lot of hard things simpler and help me reason about certain programs better. But they're not panaceas.

Tehnix 9y ago
> As someone who really likes Haskell, I've found the response to the talk from Haskellers, like in that thread, really disappointing. The common refrains indicating that Rich doesn't understand Haskell, types, etc. are patronizing and likely incorrect. (I realize he's trying to hit a few targets, from C++ to Java to Haskell in one go, so it's not always clear which he's complaining about.) I can see why you would feel that, if you hadn't seen Hickey's talk, being having seen it he was honestly quite patronising himself towards static typing, so no wonder he would risk getting some of the same tone back. That said, I don't think it is far off to say he doesn't understand Haskell, either that or he deliberately ignores the solutions that Haskell offer to the problems he's complaining about. Also, one commenter from the thread mentioned, I do know from interviews that he's done (MS Channel9, i think it was) that he has at least a passing familiarity with Haskell as of 5-10 years ago, but that's a completely different beast to what exists now Including he himself mainly focusing on having been a C++ programmer. > underestimate how little reach the type system has in an open system where data's flying around arbitrary services There are certainly times when dynamic programming is nice and all, but I feel your statement is quite disproven with e.g. something like Haxl and Facebooks spam filter, which is an incredibly large scale open system, unless we have some different definition of that. Finally, I agree Haskell and the like are not panaceas, but when a person goes out with incorrect/invalid points talking down about the effectiveness of a system, when in fact the users of it would agree it is highly effective, I feel like it does no benefit to the community to simply let it stand just because the person speaking is someone kinda famous.
- carljv 9y ago
  > I feel like it does no benefit to the community to simply let it stand just because the person speaking is someone kinda famous. That's not really what's happening. As I explained in my comment, I've found the technical rebuttals by Haskellers to be lacking. Yes, of course Haskell can be and has been used to make large, high quality systems. I can say the same for C++. That doesn't mean there aren't costs associated with those languages, and good reasons why someone might want to make different decisions about how to design a language. This is literally what the talk was about: why Clojure was designed the way it was. Not why Haskell is a bad language (it's a great language), but why Clojure was designed differently. Pretending like the type system has no costs and only benefits is not serving the Haskell community well. > I can see why you would feel that, if you hadn't seen Hickey's talk Not sure what this comment is. I've clearly seen the talk. This pattern of assuming someone who disagrees with you must have less information is off-putting. What I'm taking away from Haskeller rebuttals is: Haskell has solutions to all your problems, if only you're smarter than Rich Hickey. This is not, to me, a compelling sales pitch.
  - tome 9y ago
    > What I'm taking away from Haskeller rebuttals is: Haskell has solutions to all your problems, if only you're smarter than Rich Hickey. This is not, to me, a compelling sales pitch. As one of the Haskell rebutters, let me give my point of view. Firstly, "Haskell has solutions to all your problems" is a perfectly good overstatement of the case. No need to bring Rich Hickey's intelligence into it. Secondly, Haskell gets you at least quite far towards Hickey's goals. Haskell does have solutions, or at least partial solutions, to all of the problems Hickey raises. Where the Haskell support is particularly weak, for example with row types, we've admitted that. Yet neither he nor his proponents here have shown any understanding of the Haskell (partial) solutions. If he or they had said "I know about all this great stuff, parametric polymorphism, generics, Dynamic, -fdefertypeerrors, ... but it still doesn't get you close to Clojure because of <specific reasons>" then he would be presenting a useful argument. As it is all we can do is disabuse Clojurists of their basic misunderstandings of how Haskell works. Am I being hypocritical? After all, I do not know the intricacies of Clojure. But I'm not the one up on stage being filmed making claims about a language I don't seem to be familiar with.

by carljv 9y ago

Tehnix 9y ago

> As someone who really likes Haskell, I've found the response to the talk from Haskellers, like in that thread, really disappointing. The common refrains indicating that Rich doesn't understand Haskell, types, etc. are patronizing and likely incorrect. (I realize he's trying to hit a few targets, from C++ to Java to Haskell in one go, so it's not always clear which he's complaining about.) I can see why you would feel that, if you hadn't seen Hickey's talk, being having seen it he was honestly quite patronising himself towards static typing, so no wonder he would risk getting some of the same tone back. That said, I don't think it is far off to say he doesn't understand Haskell, either that or he deliberately ignores the solutions that Haskell offer to the problems he's complaining about. Also, one commenter from the thread mentioned, I do know from interviews that he's done (MS Channel9, i think it was) that he has at least a passing familiarity with Haskell as of 5-10 years ago, but that's a completely different beast to what exists now Including he himself mainly focusing on having been a C++ programmer. > underestimate how little reach the type system has in an open system where data's flying around arbitrary services There are certainly times when dynamic programming is nice and all, but I feel your statement is quite disproven with e.g. something like Haxl and Facebooks spam filter, which is an incredibly large scale open system, unless we have some different definition of that. Finally, I agree Haskell and the like are not panaceas, but when a person goes out with incorrect/invalid points talking down about the effectiveness of a system, when in fact the users of it would agree it is highly effective, I feel like it does no benefit to the community to simply let it stand just because the person speaking is someone kinda famous.

carljv 9y ago
> I feel like it does no benefit to the community to simply let it stand just because the person speaking is someone kinda famous. That's not really what's happening. As I explained in my comment, I've found the technical rebuttals by Haskellers to be lacking. Yes, of course Haskell can be and has been used to make large, high quality systems. I can say the same for C++. That doesn't mean there aren't costs associated with those languages, and good reasons why someone might want to make different decisions about how to design a language. This is literally what the talk was about: why Clojure was designed the way it was. Not why Haskell is a bad language (it's a great language), but why Clojure was designed differently. Pretending like the type system has no costs and only benefits is not serving the Haskell community well. > I can see why you would feel that, if you hadn't seen Hickey's talk Not sure what this comment is. I've clearly seen the talk. This pattern of assuming someone who disagrees with you must have less information is off-putting. What I'm taking away from Haskeller rebuttals is: Haskell has solutions to all your problems, if only you're smarter than Rich Hickey. This is not, to me, a compelling sales pitch.
- tome 9y ago
  > What I'm taking away from Haskeller rebuttals is: Haskell has solutions to all your problems, if only you're smarter than Rich Hickey. This is not, to me, a compelling sales pitch. As one of the Haskell rebutters, let me give my point of view. Firstly, "Haskell has solutions to all your problems" is a perfectly good overstatement of the case. No need to bring Rich Hickey's intelligence into it. Secondly, Haskell gets you at least quite far towards Hickey's goals. Haskell does have solutions, or at least partial solutions, to all of the problems Hickey raises. Where the Haskell support is particularly weak, for example with row types, we've admitted that. Yet neither he nor his proponents here have shown any understanding of the Haskell (partial) solutions. If he or they had said "I know about all this great stuff, parametric polymorphism, generics, Dynamic, -fdefertypeerrors, ... but it still doesn't get you close to Clojure because of <specific reasons>" then he would be presenting a useful argument. As it is all we can do is disabuse Clojurists of their basic misunderstandings of how Haskell works. Am I being hypocritical? After all, I do not know the intricacies of Clojure. But I'm not the one up on stage being filmed making claims about a language I don't seem to be familiar with.