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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 indic

by 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.
  - carljv 9y ago
    I get why the tone of the talk is ruffling feathers. If I were a serious Haskeller, I think I'd be a little miffed too. But I think it misses the forest for the trees, and I think, as I commented before, it's hard to understand the context of his issues without understanding his interest in systems. So I get why a lot of rebuttals have been focused on his somewhat glib representation of certain features, but it's still a little frustrating, because I don't think it's a particularly interesting debate. I also don't think he referred to Haskell specifically at any point, and really just spoke about algebraic type systems generally. It wasn't in the scope of the talk, and I don't think it'd be a very interesting talk, to compare Clojure and Haskell features. I bet he thinks Haskell is a great language. Clojure takes a lot of inspiration from Haskell: default immutability, core seq functions that look like Data.List; STM, etc. There probably wouldn't be Clojure without Haskell. His whole point is that types, like any other design feature, come with costs. They can be quite heavy and constraining compared to their benefits in certain contexts, and that may not be worth it. That being said, I don't think it's a compelling rebuttal to say: "If you use Dynamic and fdefertypeerror, Haskell addresses his issues." You'd be run out of town writing Haskell code like that. Re. parametric polymorphism, he explicitly talks about parametricity, and his take seems to be that he doesn't find parametric types that useful for conveying information or guaranteeing interesting things (to him) about your program. I think he's exaggerating, but I get that it's a response to a lot of breathless advocacy about how informative type signatures are. Again, regarding his tone in the talk, I get it. But I think this should provide Haskellers a good opportunity to examine how casually dismissive they are of other languages, especially dynamic ones. IME, statically typed FP proponents are much more dismissive of dynamic languages than dynamic language proponents are of types. It's often "Your language is unsound garbage for lazy programmers" vs. "Sometimes the type system becomes an overly-complex constraint on my problem." As someone who does like types, I'm nonetheless glad that there are folks designing sound dynamic languages and arguing for their usefulness.

by Tehnix 9y ago

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.
- carljv 9y ago
  I get why the tone of the talk is ruffling feathers. If I were a serious Haskeller, I think I'd be a little miffed too. But I think it misses the forest for the trees, and I think, as I commented before, it's hard to understand the context of his issues without understanding his interest in systems. So I get why a lot of rebuttals have been focused on his somewhat glib representation of certain features, but it's still a little frustrating, because I don't think it's a particularly interesting debate. I also don't think he referred to Haskell specifically at any point, and really just spoke about algebraic type systems generally. It wasn't in the scope of the talk, and I don't think it'd be a very interesting talk, to compare Clojure and Haskell features. I bet he thinks Haskell is a great language. Clojure takes a lot of inspiration from Haskell: default immutability, core seq functions that look like Data.List; STM, etc. There probably wouldn't be Clojure without Haskell. His whole point is that types, like any other design feature, come with costs. They can be quite heavy and constraining compared to their benefits in certain contexts, and that may not be worth it. That being said, I don't think it's a compelling rebuttal to say: "If you use Dynamic and fdefertypeerror, Haskell addresses his issues." You'd be run out of town writing Haskell code like that. Re. parametric polymorphism, he explicitly talks about parametricity, and his take seems to be that he doesn't find parametric types that useful for conveying information or guaranteeing interesting things (to him) about your program. I think he's exaggerating, but I get that it's a response to a lot of breathless advocacy about how informative type signatures are. Again, regarding his tone in the talk, I get it. But I think this should provide Haskellers a good opportunity to examine how casually dismissive they are of other languages, especially dynamic ones. IME, statically typed FP proponents are much more dismissive of dynamic languages than dynamic language proponents are of types. It's often "Your language is unsound garbage for lazy programmers" vs. "Sometimes the type system becomes an overly-complex constraint on my problem." As someone who does like types, I'm nonetheless glad that there are folks designing sound dynamic languages and arguing for their usefulness.