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> It's not a great language (clearly demonstrated by the discussion about it being good or not) but it's not terrible I'm wondering what would be an example of

> It's not a great language (clearly demonstrated by the discussion about it being good or not) but it's not terrible I'm wondering what would be an example of a great language? Because we know that there are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses

tromp 8y ago
I like to think of Haskell as a great language. It still has its warts (e.g. last [0,1/3..2] > 2), but if you wan't wart free, there's probably nothing beyond lambda calculus. Being the closest thing to lambda calculus with enough syntactic sugar on top to make it practical is a large part of what makes Haskell great.
- CiPHPerCoder 8y ago
  The one thing that makes Haskell not great is that its understanding is not widely intuitive. People with mathy backgrounds that don't blink at the phrase "lambda calculus" won't consider this, but a lot of people struggle with math. If you can't put it in the hands of a 6th grader (in the public school system with no special tutoring) and have a reasonable chance of it being understood (n.b. I self-taught myself early JavaScript when I was in the 5th grade, and picked up PHP the following year), it won't ever be "great".
  - rusk 8y ago
    Here's a thing about mathy languages too ... I've done a bit of lisp so I'd like to think I kind of get it ... but aren't computers by their very nature "imperative"? i.e. such that C or Pascal perhaps map more naturally to the underlying system? Can these mathy languages (oriented around our rationalist perspective of the world) truly ever be sympathetic to the hardware? What I mean is, nice as these are ... is there always going to be a bit of waste when you use them?
  - the_af 8y ago
    This is the one criticism of Haskell that in my opinion has no merit. Programming languages are not intuitive. They are a learned skill. You know the saying (sometimes said as a joke) "such-and-such language failed because it didn't have C-like syntax" -- but C-like syntax is NOT intuitive! Reading C code is a learned skill. Maybe it could be amended to "since many programmers learned to program using languages with a syntax inspired by C, wildly different syntaxes learned at a later stage are more difficult to them", which is a more reasonable proposition. This could be fixed by teaching programmers other languages early on. Haskell is no more or less intuitive than JavaScript. It's just different.
    - CiPHPerCoder 8y ago
      > Programming languages are not intuitive. They are a learned skill. I can teach someone Python or JavaScript in a few weeks, at a casual pace, where they can accept input from STDIN or a file, do some calculations, and produce output to STDOUT or another file. Haskell? I'd need a dedicated fucking thesaurus on-hand for them to grok the paradigm, and it would take a few months before they could achieve the same result. I have another point here: If the only languages that are considered great are the ones that make people feel smarter than everyone else for being able to understand, we don't need great languages. Most of us need easy, practical languages that help us solve problems and don't get in our way. (Most of achieving this property comes down to ecosystem rather than language design.)
      - danlugo92 8y ago
        That's a fallacy. Just because something is harder to operate doesn't mean it can't be better. Example f1 cars vs normal cars, two propeller ships vs single propeller ones.
        CiPHPerCoder 8y ago
        > That's a fallacy. Just because something is harder to operate doesn't mean it can't be better. Where did I say it "can't" be better?
      - 8y ago
  - SZJX 8y ago
    Depends on how you define "great". Haskell intentionally keeps itself off the mainstream. That has always been a deliberate choice. There are now already plenty of more practical functional languages, e.g. OCaml, F#, Julia, Elixir, Clojure, which are in part driven by the advancement in research brought about by Haskell, so it has been fulfilling its duty in that way.
- rusk 8y ago
  Haskell was the first thing that came to mind. I can show with one hand, by joining my pointer-finger and thumb, the number of people I know that use it. It looks lovely, and it's something I'd very much like to learn some day but I can't for the life of me think of what I would use it for. Are there any killer apps out there for it? At least with lisp, I can configure emacs ...
  - yakubin 8y ago
    Pandoc and Xmonad are written in Haskell.
    - icebraining 8y ago
      Also git-annex!
    - rusk 8y ago
      Interesting but again, short of contributing to these projects what am I going to do with Haskell?
      - the_af 8y ago
        Haskell is used in the industry, see: https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell_in_industry https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell_in_industry You could start your own project. You could contribute to an existing project. You could evangelize Haskell at your job, if possible. All of these are hard, of course. It'll be easier to use a more mainstream language. But if Haskell strikes your fancy, maybe it's worth the effort?
        rusk 8y ago
        > maybe it's worth the effort? Yep. Sure. Just as soon as I get done shaving this Yak ;-)
        the_af 8y ago
        Well, people have managed to successfully use Haskell in the industry. Occasionally someone with a success story even posts here on HN.
- sshine 8y ago
  I also like to think of Haskell as a great language. But [0,1\3..2] being a wart? Here's an old HN thread that bashes Haskell: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9434516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9434516
- JPKab 8y ago
  I love functional programming, but nobody use Haskell. Clojure, yeah. Guy next to me at work was trying to build a web app with haskell for a hackathon, and I was blown away by how little the community had to offer for basic things he couldn't get working. So yeah, languages people complain about, and ones nobody uses.
- Volt 8y ago
  Hugs: Hugs> last [0,1/3..2] > 2 False GHCi: Prelude> last [0,1/3..2] > 2 True ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
regularfry 8y ago
My response to this is usually that Ruby is a great language because it's easy to get useful work done with a large, meaningful subset of the language. You can ignore the warts just by not using them. You can't do that in JS, because the warts are so fundamental. (yes, you can be tripped up by library authors in Ruby, but there's community backpressure against providing footguns).
- Bahamut 8y ago
  One can make the exact same argument for JS as well - I’m not sure what distinguishing point is intended here.
- teek 8y ago
  I don't agree. The ruby community had a recent love affair with dsl. Taking a peak at rspec library source made my eyes bleed. There's also a huge preference for "magic" even outside of rails, so much that when you want to augment or add functionality you're supposed to monkey patch. There's also a huge preference for "clean" syntax when it doesn't necessarily improve maintainability--it just makes the number of odd syntax rules you have to learn and internalize more convoluted. Also I feel as though the reason there's so much preference for tests and strict rubocop is exactly because there are too many footguns baked into the language. That's not to say other dynamically typed languages (including js) or even statically typed languages are all that much better. But I would say ruby is really showing its age with the number of warts and hacks that have accumulated.
  - toasterlovin 8y ago
    FYI, there is a significant contingent of the Ruby community that doesn’t use rspec (for exactly the reasons you mention). Heck, the test suites for Rails and Ruby itself use minitest, not rspec. It’s hard to notice this, though, because the rspec people have a vastly larger written output. It sounds like most of your criticisms are criticisms of dynamic languages. Ruby gives you a million and one footguns, but they are beautiful and elegant footguns.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
SZJX 8y ago
My two cents is that I currently find Elixir and Julia to combine productivity and all the goodness from functional programming really well. Not sure what sort of backlash they'll get if they go more mainstream in the future (which I believe they will). I don't think it's totally hype since I also tried my hands on Rust a lot but I really struggled and eventually disliked it a lot. I couldn't seem to implement any complex structure without resorting to unsafe code. Maybe I'm just a shit low-level programmer in terms of thinking about ownership though.
- steveklabnik 8y ago
  Complex data structures often need unsafe; writing them isn’t a good way to learn Rust. Most already have implementations you can just use, so it’s not something most rust programmers do often.

tromp 8y ago

I like to think of Haskell as a great language. It still has its warts (e.g. last [0,1/3..2] > 2), but if you wan't wart free, there's probably nothing beyond lambda calculus. Being the closest thing to lambda calculus with enough syntactic sugar on top to make it practical is a large part of what makes Haskell great.

CiPHPerCoder 8y ago
The one thing that makes Haskell not great is that its understanding is not widely intuitive. People with mathy backgrounds that don't blink at the phrase "lambda calculus" won't consider this, but a lot of people struggle with math. If you can't put it in the hands of a 6th grader (in the public school system with no special tutoring) and have a reasonable chance of it being understood (n.b. I self-taught myself early JavaScript when I was in the 5th grade, and picked up PHP the following year), it won't ever be "great".
- rusk 8y ago
  Here's a thing about mathy languages too ... I've done a bit of lisp so I'd like to think I kind of get it ... but aren't computers by their very nature "imperative"? i.e. such that C or Pascal perhaps map more naturally to the underlying system? Can these mathy languages (oriented around our rationalist perspective of the world) truly ever be sympathetic to the hardware? What I mean is, nice as these are ... is there always going to be a bit of waste when you use them?
- the_af 8y ago
  This is the one criticism of Haskell that in my opinion has no merit. Programming languages are not intuitive. They are a learned skill. You know the saying (sometimes said as a joke) "such-and-such language failed because it didn't have C-like syntax" -- but C-like syntax is NOT intuitive! Reading C code is a learned skill. Maybe it could be amended to "since many programmers learned to program using languages with a syntax inspired by C, wildly different syntaxes learned at a later stage are more difficult to them", which is a more reasonable proposition. This could be fixed by teaching programmers other languages early on. Haskell is no more or less intuitive than JavaScript. It's just different.
  - CiPHPerCoder 8y ago
    > Programming languages are not intuitive. They are a learned skill. I can teach someone Python or JavaScript in a few weeks, at a casual pace, where they can accept input from STDIN or a file, do some calculations, and produce output to STDOUT or another file. Haskell? I'd need a dedicated fucking thesaurus on-hand for them to grok the paradigm, and it would take a few months before they could achieve the same result. I have another point here: If the only languages that are considered great are the ones that make people feel smarter than everyone else for being able to understand, we don't need great languages. Most of us need easy, practical languages that help us solve problems and don't get in our way. (Most of achieving this property comes down to ecosystem rather than language design.)
    - danlugo92 8y ago
      That's a fallacy. Just because something is harder to operate doesn't mean it can't be better. Example f1 cars vs normal cars, two propeller ships vs single propeller ones.
      - CiPHPerCoder 8y ago
        > That's a fallacy. Just because something is harder to operate doesn't mean it can't be better. Where did I say it "can't" be better?
    - 8y ago
- SZJX 8y ago
  Depends on how you define "great". Haskell intentionally keeps itself off the mainstream. That has always been a deliberate choice. There are now already plenty of more practical functional languages, e.g. OCaml, F#, Julia, Elixir, Clojure, which are in part driven by the advancement in research brought about by Haskell, so it has been fulfilling its duty in that way.
rusk 8y ago
Haskell was the first thing that came to mind. I can show with one hand, by joining my pointer-finger and thumb, the number of people I know that use it. It looks lovely, and it's something I'd very much like to learn some day but I can't for the life of me think of what I would use it for. Are there any killer apps out there for it? At least with lisp, I can configure emacs ...
- yakubin 8y ago
  Pandoc and Xmonad are written in Haskell.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    Also git-annex!
  - rusk 8y ago
    Interesting but again, short of contributing to these projects what am I going to do with Haskell?
    - the_af 8y ago
      Haskell is used in the industry, see: https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell_in_industry https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell_in_industry You could start your own project. You could contribute to an existing project. You could evangelize Haskell at your job, if possible. All of these are hard, of course. It'll be easier to use a more mainstream language. But if Haskell strikes your fancy, maybe it's worth the effort?
      - rusk 8y ago
        > maybe it's worth the effort? Yep. Sure. Just as soon as I get done shaving this Yak ;-)
        the_af 8y ago
        Well, people have managed to successfully use Haskell in the industry. Occasionally someone with a success story even posts here on HN.
sshine 8y ago
I also like to think of Haskell as a great language. But [0,1\3..2] being a wart? Here's an old HN thread that bashes Haskell: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9434516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9434516
JPKab 8y ago
I love functional programming, but nobody use Haskell. Clojure, yeah. Guy next to me at work was trying to build a web app with haskell for a hackathon, and I was blown away by how little the community had to offer for basic things he couldn't get working. So yeah, languages people complain about, and ones nobody uses.
Volt 8y ago
Hugs: Hugs> last [0,1/3..2] > 2 False GHCi: Prelude> last [0,1/3..2] > 2 True ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

regularfry 8y ago

My response to this is usually that Ruby is a great language because it's easy to get useful work done with a large, meaningful subset of the language. You can ignore the warts just by not using them. You can't do that in JS, because the warts are so fundamental. (yes, you can be tripped up by library authors in Ruby, but there's community backpressure against providing footguns).

Bahamut 8y ago
One can make the exact same argument for JS as well - I’m not sure what distinguishing point is intended here.
teek 8y ago
I don't agree. The ruby community had a recent love affair with dsl. Taking a peak at rspec library source made my eyes bleed. There's also a huge preference for "magic" even outside of rails, so much that when you want to augment or add functionality you're supposed to monkey patch. There's also a huge preference for "clean" syntax when it doesn't necessarily improve maintainability--it just makes the number of odd syntax rules you have to learn and internalize more convoluted. Also I feel as though the reason there's so much preference for tests and strict rubocop is exactly because there are too many footguns baked into the language. That's not to say other dynamically typed languages (including js) or even statically typed languages are all that much better. But I would say ruby is really showing its age with the number of warts and hacks that have accumulated.
- toasterlovin 8y ago
  FYI, there is a significant contingent of the Ruby community that doesn’t use rspec (for exactly the reasons you mention). Heck, the test suites for Rails and Ruby itself use minitest, not rspec. It’s hard to notice this, though, because the rspec people have a vastly larger written output. It sounds like most of your criticisms are criticisms of dynamic languages. Ruby gives you a million and one footguns, but they are beautiful and elegant footguns.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

SZJX 8y ago

My two cents is that I currently find Elixir and Julia to combine productivity and all the goodness from functional programming really well. Not sure what sort of backlash they'll get if they go more mainstream in the future (which I believe they will). I don't think it's totally hype since I also tried my hands on Rust a lot but I really struggled and eventually disliked it a lot. I couldn't seem to implement any complex structure without resorting to unsafe code. Maybe I'm just a shit low-level programmer in terms of thinking about ownership though.

steveklabnik 8y ago
Complex data structures often need unsafe; writing them isn’t a good way to learn Rust. Most already have implementations you can just use, so it’s not something most rust programmers do often.