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> Easy for whom? Nearly everyone I have met and/or worked with. > Finding Haskell difficult is nothing to be ashamed of Agreed. > It can be humbling to real

> Easy for whom? Nearly everyone I have met and/or worked with. > Finding Haskell difficult is nothing to be ashamed of Agreed. > It can be humbling to realize that there's a whole branch of programming you're completely new to and know little about. Agreed. > It's worth the effort! To learn it? Sure. To use it? I disagree. I was more unproductive with Haskell than I've ever been with C, which is usually the language I love to bash on. I can look up opcodes and write assembly faster. "Ah, but with experience!" - I don't see why I'd bother. I write mostly functional code in any language I'm working in as it is. The functional parts of Haskell don't really have anything for me, at least not to compensate the pain of not getting anything done. Take lens, for instance. It's an incredibly complicated solution to a problem that AFAIK only plagues Haskell! I'd love to know of any exceptions. Writing networking code was an exercise in frustration where I had to try multiple libraries and faff about with changing types from eager to lazy bytestrings.. I'm glad I bothered to try and learn Haskell. I just don't see me ever using it in production, let alone try to hire anyone who knows it. It's hard enough finding Python programmers who know what generator expressions are.

agentultra 8y ago
If we're only talking experiences here then I can say that I've written plenty of networking code in C. I grew up on C. I have 15+ years' experiencein C-like languages across the gamut; more if you count the years when I was a youth and hacking together games and homework assignments for fun. I've definitely felt the pain you're describing and have even thought of lens in the way you ascribe. How can anyone be productive in a language where logging is so difficult to add? I can add logging to a Python application in 3 lines. And as you say... converting from lazy to strict from text to bytestring to string depending on the library. So annoying! Nothing like those clean examples they show you in the tutorials! Every time I went down that rabbit hole was because I was getting frustrated with feeling like a beginner again. What was I getting from Haskell for all of this hassle? Why were these simple things in other languages so hard? What's the benefit? Peace of mind. It's easier to get started with a C or Python or Javascript program. Partly because of experience. Partly because those languages do nothing to isolate side effects, constrain mutation, or check my code in any effective way. I stick to a particular style (usually functional), I write tests first, and I usually end up paying for that easy start later on in the project when, despite our intentions and efforts; side effects, mutation, and plain old type errors creep in. What I gain in efficiency early on in the project I pay for later with interest. The interest rate is only compounded when we start adding team members. My experience with Haskell has been that it is frustrating and sometimes slower to get started with, especially when I was first starting out, but that it has been worth the effort in the long run. Down the road when my project started to grow I was better equipped to manage the complexity because I had a type system that kept me honest and guided me towards strong designs. I had a tool that would ensure that only the parts I was really sure about could perform IO actions or use shared mutable state. And best of all I could not touch a module for months and when I came back to it there's a good chance I could understand what it was doing, make the change I needed to make, refactor it, and push it to production without any worries. I think the human side of software development was the nicest feature of working with Haskell. As I added new team members I didn't have to worry about junior developers breaking the build as much. Training was much more straight forward. The documentation was much easier to write as we could focus on the higher-level designs and let the type system document the details. Testing was more effective as we could focus on problems and tests that brought more value to the business problems. I still choose other languages for various reasons but Haskell has been worth it in my experience. Painful but worth it.

agentultra 8y ago

If we're only talking experiences here then I can say that I've written plenty of networking code in C. I grew up on C. I have 15+ years' experiencein C-like languages across the gamut; more if you count the years when I was a youth and hacking together games and homework assignments for fun. I've definitely felt the pain you're describing and have even thought of lens in the way you ascribe. How can anyone be productive in a language where logging is so difficult to add? I can add logging to a Python application in 3 lines. And as you say... converting from lazy to strict from text to bytestring to string depending on the library. So annoying! Nothing like those clean examples they show you in the tutorials! Every time I went down that rabbit hole was because I was getting frustrated with feeling like a beginner again. What was I getting from Haskell for all of this hassle? Why were these simple things in other languages so hard? What's the benefit? Peace of mind. It's easier to get started with a C or Python or Javascript program. Partly because of experience. Partly because those languages do nothing to isolate side effects, constrain mutation, or check my code in any effective way. I stick to a particular style (usually functional), I write tests first, and I usually end up paying for that easy start later on in the project when, despite our intentions and efforts; side effects, mutation, and plain old type errors creep in. What I gain in efficiency early on in the project I pay for later with interest. The interest rate is only compounded when we start adding team members. My experience with Haskell has been that it is frustrating and sometimes slower to get started with, especially when I was first starting out, but that it has been worth the effort in the long run. Down the road when my project started to grow I was better equipped to manage the complexity because I had a type system that kept me honest and guided me towards strong designs. I had a tool that would ensure that only the parts I was really sure about could perform IO actions or use shared mutable state. And best of all I could not touch a module for months and when I came back to it there's a good chance I could understand what it was doing, make the change I needed to make, refactor it, and push it to production without any worries. I think the human side of software development was the nicest feature of working with Haskell. As I added new team members I didn't have to worry about junior developers breaking the build as much. Training was much more straight forward. The documentation was much easier to write as we could focus on the higher-level designs and let the type system document the details. Testing was more effective as we could focus on problems and tests that brought more value to the business problems. I still choose other languages for various reasons but Haskell has been worth it in my experience. Painful but worth it.