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When somebody tosses around phrases like how to subvert Haskell's type system to accomplish basic shit you can do in other languages, it's a big red flag that t

When somebody tosses around phrases like how to subvert Haskell's type system to accomplish basic shit you can do in other languages, it's a big red flag that they've never used Haskell, and possibly have never even seen Haskell code. Well, actually, unless you've tried using Haskell you probably don't realize the it has a type system completely different from 'other languages'. About Blub: That's a stick you can use to beat anybody who criticizes any other language. Oh, you don't think Brainfuck has anything to offer? Hah! Go read pg's essay on blub!

jmillikin 16y ago
Well, actually, unless you've tried using Haskell you probably don't realize the it has a type system completely different from 'other languages'. Really? Before I started using it, the only things I knew about Haskell were 1) it has a weird type system 2) it uses something called 'monads' and 3) doing IO is really really hard. #3 turned out to be false, #2 was true but not as scary as the hype, and #1 was true. It's not surprising that non-users know about the "odd" type system; types are one of the few ways arbitrary languages can be compared, so I know the type systems of many languages I've never so much as written Hello World in. About Blub: That's a stick you can use to beat anybody who criticizes any other language. Not so; one can use it to criticize anybody who claims a language is bad because it is more expressive than usual. For example, there are languages with more expressive type systems than even Haskell; if a programmer used to such language called Haskell inexpressive, it wouldn't make any sense to argue against them with Blub (regardless of whether he's correct).
eru 16y ago
> completely different from 'other languages'. It's not too different from OCaml or Clean. (Though, I do miss type classes in them.)
- kwantam 16y ago
  Also, Standard ML. I learned Standard ML and created a couple toy systems in it before becoming utterly frustrated with the insane state of the "standard" library[1] and fleeing to Haskell. I briefly considered OCaml, but of the MLish languages it seemed to me that OCaml had the ugliest syntax, so I chose Haskell instead. Dumb reason to choose a language, probably, but I absolutely adore Haskell. ...and I have spent an entire weekend trying to figure out how to describe within Haskell's type system something that is trivial in scheme[2] ! [1] In particular, there's a lot that's not in the SML spec that most people want in a stdlib, and every compiler's implementation is quite different. This means once you decide to use SML/NJ, if someone else has written a library you need, but for MLton, you're just up the creek. Perhaps this also happens with resp. GHC and Hugs, but I haven't found it to be nearly as much of a problem. [2] If you care: can I create a function that takes as its arguments another function and a list, and applies the elements of the list as arguments to the function? E.g., listApply (+) [1,2] should return 3. In scheme, assuming that you already have curried functions, this is trivial. In Haskell, it's exceedingly difficult. Consider: the approach in scheme, iterative partial applications, absolutely won't work in Haskell, since the types won't match: (+) has type (Num t) => t -> t -> t, but (+1) is (Num t) => t -> t. It turns out it's possible either with explicit isorecursive types (and some lifting functions) or using Template Haskell. For posterity, I posted both solutions on this old StackOverflow question I found when looking at how others had handled the same problem (viz., they hadn't, generally): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3775446/passing-list-elements-as-parameters-to-curried-function/4241972#4241972 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3775446/passing-list-elem...
  - eru 16y ago
    I also love Haskell's syntax. It's very tasteful in most choices. Although my opinion of Python has gone down over the last few years, I still like its syntax, too. Especially the significant indentation, but I believe that Haskell has the slightly better mechanism, by defining indentation as a syntax sugar that you can avoid, if you want to. OCaml's standard library is also quite dismal. At the recent meeting of the OCaml consortium in Paris we suggested creating a new extended standard library. (We will reuse Core and Batteries et al, of course.) A co-worker and I are in the procss of writing a regular expression module that doesn't suck. It will be threadsafe and use poor OCaml---the module from the standard library calls C-code to run a backtracking bytecode interpreter with lots of mutable state.

jmillikin 16y ago

Well, actually, unless you've tried using Haskell you probably don't realize the it has a type system completely different from 'other languages'. Really? Before I started using it, the only things I knew about Haskell were 1) it has a weird type system 2) it uses something called 'monads' and 3) doing IO is really really hard. #3 turned out to be false, #2 was true but not as scary as the hype, and #1 was true. It's not surprising that non-users know about the "odd" type system; types are one of the few ways arbitrary languages can be compared, so I know the type systems of many languages I've never so much as written Hello World in. About Blub: That's a stick you can use to beat anybody who criticizes any other language. Not so; one can use it to criticize anybody who claims a language is bad because it is more expressive than usual. For example, there are languages with more expressive type systems than even Haskell; if a programmer used to such language called Haskell inexpressive, it wouldn't make any sense to argue against them with Blub (regardless of whether he's correct).

eru 16y ago

> completely different from 'other languages'. It's not too different from OCaml or Clean. (Though, I do miss type classes in them.)

kwantam 16y ago
Also, Standard ML. I learned Standard ML and created a couple toy systems in it before becoming utterly frustrated with the insane state of the "standard" library[1] and fleeing to Haskell. I briefly considered OCaml, but of the MLish languages it seemed to me that OCaml had the ugliest syntax, so I chose Haskell instead. Dumb reason to choose a language, probably, but I absolutely adore Haskell. ...and I have spent an entire weekend trying to figure out how to describe within Haskell's type system something that is trivial in scheme[2] ! [1] In particular, there's a lot that's not in the SML spec that most people want in a stdlib, and every compiler's implementation is quite different. This means once you decide to use SML/NJ, if someone else has written a library you need, but for MLton, you're just up the creek. Perhaps this also happens with resp. GHC and Hugs, but I haven't found it to be nearly as much of a problem. [2] If you care: can I create a function that takes as its arguments another function and a list, and applies the elements of the list as arguments to the function? E.g., listApply (+) [1,2] should return 3. In scheme, assuming that you already have curried functions, this is trivial. In Haskell, it's exceedingly difficult. Consider: the approach in scheme, iterative partial applications, absolutely won't work in Haskell, since the types won't match: (+) has type (Num t) => t -> t -> t, but (+1) is (Num t) => t -> t. It turns out it's possible either with explicit isorecursive types (and some lifting functions) or using Template Haskell. For posterity, I posted both solutions on this old StackOverflow question I found when looking at how others had handled the same problem (viz., they hadn't, generally): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3775446/passing-list-elements-as-parameters-to-curried-function/4241972#4241972 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3775446/passing-list-elem...
- eru 16y ago
  I also love Haskell's syntax. It's very tasteful in most choices. Although my opinion of Python has gone down over the last few years, I still like its syntax, too. Especially the significant indentation, but I believe that Haskell has the slightly better mechanism, by defining indentation as a syntax sugar that you can avoid, if you want to. OCaml's standard library is also quite dismal. At the recent meeting of the OCaml consortium in Paris we suggested creating a new extended standard library. (We will reuse Core and Batteries et al, of course.) A co-worker and I are in the procss of writing a regular expression module that doesn't suck. It will be threadsafe and use poor OCaml---the module from the standard library calls C-code to run a backtracking bytecode interpreter with lots of mutable state.