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There was a hackernews post yesterday where the top voted comment asserted that computer science and maths is (in practice) only useful for data structures and

There was a hackernews post yesterday where the top voted comment asserted that computer science and maths is (in practice) only useful for data structures and algorithms; everything else needed either physics or social science. This is why Haskell is important. Haskell will help teach people the mathematics behind program construction: how to write composable code, how to reason about effects, how to write consistent, general, less ad-hoc APIs.

ukj 7y ago
The balance between beauty/structure and effectiveness is tough to get right. There are cases where functional programming is essential, and there are cases where it's an absolute overkill. Developing the judgment to tell which is which is this 'experience' part. 25 years in this industry and I still undergo frequent regret when I write ugly-but-effective code, and frequent anxiety when I have to write 300 lines to accomplish what can be accomplished in half that. Time-preference is a blessing and a curse.
UncleMeat 7y ago
But it doesn't seem to. Products built in haskell don't seem to have dramatically lower maintenance costs. They don't tend to have features that other products don't have. Nobody buys math. In all of the recruiter spam I get, the only time that recruiters lead with "what language we use" rather than "what we are building" is when the company is using haskell. This seems backwards and gives a poor impression. There might be 100 POPL papers that I can use with haskell extensions but ultimately the act of coding is nowhere near the top of the list of important things when building systems to solve problems.
- willtim 7y ago
  > Products built in haskell don't seem to have dramatically lower maintenance costs. They don't tend to have features that other products don't have. That is your anecdote, mine is the opposite. Using Haskell at my place of work we have lower maintenance costs than other competitors that use Python. We also have features they don't have, such as checked purity (a guarantee that a financial calculation is reproducible) and transparent batching/caching/provenance (made possible by Haskell's expressiveness). None of this would be possible in Python or Java. Language/notation, is IMHO critical for the ability to think using the right abstractions. To take your argument to the extreme, we should all be still using machine code, because tools don't matter.

ukj 7y ago

The balance between beauty/structure and effectiveness is tough to get right. There are cases where functional programming is essential, and there are cases where it's an absolute overkill. Developing the judgment to tell which is which is this 'experience' part. 25 years in this industry and I still undergo frequent regret when I write ugly-but-effective code, and frequent anxiety when I have to write 300 lines to accomplish what can be accomplished in half that. Time-preference is a blessing and a curse.

UncleMeat 7y ago

But it doesn't seem to. Products built in haskell don't seem to have dramatically lower maintenance costs. They don't tend to have features that other products don't have. Nobody buys math. In all of the recruiter spam I get, the only time that recruiters lead with "what language we use" rather than "what we are building" is when the company is using haskell. This seems backwards and gives a poor impression. There might be 100 POPL papers that I can use with haskell extensions but ultimately the act of coding is nowhere near the top of the list of important things when building systems to solve problems.

willtim 7y ago
> Products built in haskell don't seem to have dramatically lower maintenance costs. They don't tend to have features that other products don't have. That is your anecdote, mine is the opposite. Using Haskell at my place of work we have lower maintenance costs than other competitors that use Python. We also have features they don't have, such as checked purity (a guarantee that a financial calculation is reproducible) and transparent batching/caching/provenance (made possible by Haskell's expressiveness). None of this would be possible in Python or Java. Language/notation, is IMHO critical for the ability to think using the right abstractions. To take your argument to the extreme, we should all be still using machine code, because tools don't matter.