4 ms·

Why do you say Haskell is an example of this? You can return undefined for anything, and have incomplete pattern matching, where if you don't mention a particul

Why do you say Haskell is an example of this? You can return undefined for anything, and have incomplete pattern matching, where if you don't mention a particular case, there is a runtime crash. An example would be head, which takes the first element of a list and throws an error on an empty list. I really love Haskell but it seems as if they are going for something different here than what Haskell provides.

deleted 8y ago
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swsieber 8y ago
Now Rust on the other hand ... (runs away). In all seriousness though, Rust does get a little closer - it requires exhaustive matching (or explicit opt out) and deliberate error handling (or explicit opt out). There are still ways around it, but the happy path in Rust is handling errors.... well, maybe not happy. It is a little verbose.
dajonker 8y ago
My point was not really to mention a particular programming language, but rather to make the point that people seem to continuously reinvent the wheel rather than reading up on history and investigating other programming languages. If you only know C/Java/Python/Go and you learn about <radically-different-language>, it will probably make you a better programmer even if you never write a single line of <radically-different-language>.
- abraae 8y ago
  I've learned the most from shifting levels of abstraction, rather than between programming languages. When I started at Oracle, on the first day my head near exploded as everyone communicated in ER diagrams instead of pseudo code or more procedural form. Learning to design databases at scale, and learning how far to go in making things metadata driven was hugely educational. More recently, breaking up legacy application domains into microservices and defining the APIs between them feels to be like a "higher" skill than database design/object modeling. Probably doing IoT projects would help bring some other skills to the fore.
nightski 8y ago
That's not really a limitation of the "language" but more of an implementation detail of GHC and Prelude imo. There are very few escape hatches from the type system and you can run the compiler so that these cases are treated as a compile time error.
dllthomas 8y ago
For "Haskell-in-practice", incomplete pattern matching isn't an issue - there's a warning for that, you should have it on, and you should have it error. `undefined` is more of an issue, although easy to exclude with code review - relying on habits isn't great but especially when the habits are this simple it's not a problem in practice. That said, Haskell still isn't actually an example, chiefly because exceptions can be thrown by any code, and are reasonably often used in practice.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

swsieber 8y ago

Now Rust on the other hand ... (runs away). In all seriousness though, Rust does get a little closer - it requires exhaustive matching (or explicit opt out) and deliberate error handling (or explicit opt out). There are still ways around it, but the happy path in Rust is handling errors.... well, maybe not happy. It is a little verbose.

dajonker 8y ago

My point was not really to mention a particular programming language, but rather to make the point that people seem to continuously reinvent the wheel rather than reading up on history and investigating other programming languages. If you only know C/Java/Python/Go and you learn about <radically-different-language>, it will probably make you a better programmer even if you never write a single line of <radically-different-language>.

abraae 8y ago
I've learned the most from shifting levels of abstraction, rather than between programming languages. When I started at Oracle, on the first day my head near exploded as everyone communicated in ER diagrams instead of pseudo code or more procedural form. Learning to design databases at scale, and learning how far to go in making things metadata driven was hugely educational. More recently, breaking up legacy application domains into microservices and defining the APIs between them feels to be like a "higher" skill than database design/object modeling. Probably doing IoT projects would help bring some other skills to the fore.

nightski 8y ago

That's not really a limitation of the "language" but more of an implementation detail of GHC and Prelude imo. There are very few escape hatches from the type system and you can run the compiler so that these cases are treated as a compile time error.

dllthomas 8y ago

For "Haskell-in-practice", incomplete pattern matching isn't an issue - there's a warning for that, you should have it on, and you should have it error. `undefined` is more of an issue, although easy to exclude with code review - relying on habits isn't great but especially when the habits are this simple it's not a problem in practice. That said, Haskell still isn't actually an example, chiefly because exceptions can be thrown by any code, and are reasonably often used in practice.