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I wrote a fairly reasonable toy raytracer in it and I found it very readable. The hard part was that the type system doesn't help you get your algorithms to sp
by jaggederest 8y ago
I wrote a fairly reasonable toy raytracer in it and I found it very readable.
The hard part was that the type system doesn't help you get your algorithms to spit out the correct answer, only the correct kind of answer. After a while I find that errors of that sort dominate the kind of things the type system helps with.
And I'm sure there are type-system-ways-to-solve-that-problem but they're nonobvious and would probably render the rest of the program more confusing. Certainly adding in error handling and state did, compared to working strictly in the IO monad.
- svachalek 8y agoEveryone thinks their own code is readable. It's when you jump into a project with code written by 10 other people that you get an idea for a language's innate readability. In my experience I tend to agree that Haskell does not score high on this dimension, its syntax is too terse and too flexible and there are few conventions about how to organize large codebases.
- jaggederest 8y agoWell, to clarify, I found the code in the libraries etc very readable, obviously I can read my own code :)
- fooker 8y agoA significant number of interesting Haskell libraries I found are thin abstractions over some C api. It makes sense that these would be readable. Is there something for Haskell which serve a similar role as boost to C++? If that is readable, I will be convinced.
- squiggleblaz 8y agoI actually disagree. I write very little Haskell but I do read it from time to time, simply because compared to any other language it's simply so readable it's almost fun. In no other language have I ever got distracted from my main goal by just reading the source code of the libraries I'm using.