10 ms·

> It is extremely hard to learn, has an extremely confusing + needlessly complicated syntax and I agree with your other points but what's wrong with the syntax

by rifung 7y ago

> It is extremely hard to learn, has an extremely confusing + needlessly complicated syntax and I agree with your other points but what's wrong with the syntax? I actually really like the syntax for the most part

epsolos 7y ago
Most people that have worked as developers/programmers/etc. that don't have a lot of exposure to or training in fp find it painfully hard to learn. This could be one of those cases.
- brokencode 7y ago
  To them, I would suggest that they remember back to when they learned their first imperative language like Java or C. For me, that was really difficult to wrap my mind around at the time, but now those languages are second nature to me. I kind of suspect that if everyone were exposed to a functional language first, there would be a lot fewer people who think they are extremely hard to learn.
  - journalctl 7y ago
    I fondly remember being confused by “return” for weeks (granted, I was 9). What are you returning? And to where? And why was it only one thing? And where did it go when it got there? It’s easy to forget how hard something was to learn once you already know it.
  - cuddlecake 7y ago
    I remember when I started with Java at University. Like, "hello, what is a method? What the hell is a class? Come on, stop kidding me, objects have methods???? How do I call them? Wait, how do I _write_ a method?"
    - shantly 7y ago
      What I kept bouncing off of was all the stupid as shit "sally sends a BUY message to Tommy's bagel shop" crap. I just needed about two to four pages worth of text & diagrams demonstrating how objects and structs are pretty much the same thing, and what the OO sugar inheritance and keywords and dynamic dispatch and such do under the hood, which ain't that complicated. Every single book I picked up (back in the '90s, when if you didn't know someone to personally recommend a book it was much harder to figure out which ones were decent and which sucked) wanted to use those awful, cutesy analogies to introduce OO and they just confused the hell out of me, and convinced me something dead-simple was hard.
  - sullyj3 7y ago
    There are many reasons Haskell is difficult to learn, and the functional programming aspects are only part of it. I'd venture a guess that it's vastly easier to go from say, python to clojure, than from python to haskell. Even neglecting clojure's impure escape hatches.
- mbrodersen 7y ago
  If you are learning something new and it isn't hard to learn then you are not learning anything truly new. Just variations/flavours of what you already know. If it is really hard then you are truly learning something new. No pain no gain.
fnord123 7y ago
++ >> >>> >>= `concat` .
Barrin92 7y ago
I'm not the OP but I would agree and my problem with the syntax is the number of symbols that don't make the semantics clear at all. The Lens library for example, but also a lot of standard stuff like the bind operator, it's extremely complex. Many people also seem to go overboard on the dot notation which can be very hard to read.
olah_1 7y ago
>but what's wrong with the syntax? I'll just link to this blog about readable Haskell. If everyone followed his advise, it would be much better. http://www.haskellforall.com/2015/09/how-to-make-your-haskell-code-more.html http://www.haskellforall.com/2015/09/how-to-make-your-haskel...
- brianberns 7y ago
  Thanks. That's a good blog. The $ operator is definitely confusing in Haskell. F# uses <| to indicate a backward pipe, which I find much more intuitive. For example: print <| even <| 4 * 2 This means: Take the result of 4 * 2 and send it to `even`, then take that result and send it to `print`. Or you can write it with forward pipes to make it even clearer: 4 * 2 |> even |> print The thing about backward pipes is that they're often used to avoid parentheses, which is IMHO a good idea. It's just that thinking of them as "function application" is confusing. F#'s operators makes the data flow clear. [Side note: The mathematical symbol for function composition is the circle operator, ∘, which is also confusing for the same reason. Does (g ∘ f)(x) mean g(f(x)) or f(g(x))? Personally, I can never remember. If math used F#'s >> and << composition operators instead, there'd be no doubt that f >> g sends the output of f to g, so (f >> g)(x) means g(f(x)).]
  - ghkbrew 7y ago
    > The $ operator is definitely confusing in Haskell I generally think of it as a sort of open-ended parentheses that encloses the rest of the line. Instead of a backward pipe. It means "evaluate everything after this character first then apply the preceding function to it" just like parentheses would. print $ even $ 4 * 2 is equivalent to print ( even ( 4 * 2 ))
    - brianberns 7y ago
      You're right, and that's why it's usually called "function application" instead of "backward pipe". However, using $ as an operator is confusing because the associativity is ambiguous if you're not already comfortable with it.
ratww 7y ago
I've been using Haskell on and off for almost ten years, and the "front end" of the language, including its syntax, is pretty much the only thing that I absolutely hate about it. The endless operators, all the language extensions required in 2019, the madness called Template Haskell, the absurdity of point free style, the multiple ways of achieving things by cleverly using . and $, the uncanny valley of do-notation (why does it look different? F# gets it right). It's too easy to be clever. It's too easy to take shortcuts that the next person won't understand. I'm completely fine with the underlying semantics! Lazy evaluation, the majestic typechecker, concepts like monads, functors, lenses. Even when it comes to syntax, I love how functions are declared, the way parenthesis work, currying, all the "simple stuff". I adore all those concepts and apply them to other languages. I long for a Haskell-like language without the stuff I mentioned above. I think the problem is that in Haskell everything feels like an afterthought, everything feels "bolt on" rather than "built in". 99% of the hot stuff is implemented using libraries. That's similar to Lisp and C++, other languages I hate (I also love Lisp parens, but I hate macros). Now that I think about it, I prefer less extensible languages that require adding code to the compiler to extend it: C#, F#, Go, JavaScript.
- thesz 7y ago
  If you can have better solution to the problem at hand with the library, you will solve it faster. Turnaround time for library is much less than for a compiler. So if language provides a way to solve something with a library instead of compiler, it provides a way for faster path to solution.
excursionist 7y ago
Haskell syntax is great except for the indentation/layout rules. There is no simple definition of the grammar with regards to the layout. It's only specified as a headache-inducting operation of a state machine [1], and the implementation is quite hard to read. This is fine for writing Haskell, but quite painful if you want to parse it. [1]https://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/haskell2010/haskellch10.html#x17-17800010.3 https://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/haskell2010/haskellch10...

by rifung 7y ago

epsolos 7y ago

Most people that have worked as developers/programmers/etc. that don't have a lot of exposure to or training in fp find it painfully hard to learn. This could be one of those cases.

brokencode 7y ago
To them, I would suggest that they remember back to when they learned their first imperative language like Java or C. For me, that was really difficult to wrap my mind around at the time, but now those languages are second nature to me. I kind of suspect that if everyone were exposed to a functional language first, there would be a lot fewer people who think they are extremely hard to learn.
- journalctl 7y ago
  I fondly remember being confused by “return” for weeks (granted, I was 9). What are you returning? And to where? And why was it only one thing? And where did it go when it got there? It’s easy to forget how hard something was to learn once you already know it.
- cuddlecake 7y ago
  I remember when I started with Java at University. Like, "hello, what is a method? What the hell is a class? Come on, stop kidding me, objects have methods???? How do I call them? Wait, how do I _write_ a method?"
  - shantly 7y ago
    What I kept bouncing off of was all the stupid as shit "sally sends a BUY message to Tommy's bagel shop" crap. I just needed about two to four pages worth of text & diagrams demonstrating how objects and structs are pretty much the same thing, and what the OO sugar inheritance and keywords and dynamic dispatch and such do under the hood, which ain't that complicated. Every single book I picked up (back in the '90s, when if you didn't know someone to personally recommend a book it was much harder to figure out which ones were decent and which sucked) wanted to use those awful, cutesy analogies to introduce OO and they just confused the hell out of me, and convinced me something dead-simple was hard.
- sullyj3 7y ago
  There are many reasons Haskell is difficult to learn, and the functional programming aspects are only part of it. I'd venture a guess that it's vastly easier to go from say, python to clojure, than from python to haskell. Even neglecting clojure's impure escape hatches.
mbrodersen 7y ago
If you are learning something new and it isn't hard to learn then you are not learning anything truly new. Just variations/flavours of what you already know. If it is really hard then you are truly learning something new. No pain no gain.

fnord123 7y ago

++ >> >>> >>= `concat` .

Barrin92 7y ago

I'm not the OP but I would agree and my problem with the syntax is the number of symbols that don't make the semantics clear at all. The Lens library for example, but also a lot of standard stuff like the bind operator, it's extremely complex. Many people also seem to go overboard on the dot notation which can be very hard to read.

olah_1 7y ago

>but what's wrong with the syntax? I'll just link to this blog about readable Haskell. If everyone followed his advise, it would be much better. http://www.haskellforall.com/2015/09/how-to-make-your-haskell-code-more.html http://www.haskellforall.com/2015/09/how-to-make-your-haskel...

brianberns 7y ago
Thanks. That's a good blog. The $ operator is definitely confusing in Haskell. F# uses <| to indicate a backward pipe, which I find much more intuitive. For example: print <| even <| 4 * 2 This means: Take the result of 4 * 2 and send it to `even`, then take that result and send it to `print`. Or you can write it with forward pipes to make it even clearer: 4 * 2 |> even |> print The thing about backward pipes is that they're often used to avoid parentheses, which is IMHO a good idea. It's just that thinking of them as "function application" is confusing. F#'s operators makes the data flow clear. [Side note: The mathematical symbol for function composition is the circle operator, ∘, which is also confusing for the same reason. Does (g ∘ f)(x) mean g(f(x)) or f(g(x))? Personally, I can never remember. If math used F#'s >> and << composition operators instead, there'd be no doubt that f >> g sends the output of f to g, so (f >> g)(x) means g(f(x)).]
- ghkbrew 7y ago
  > The $ operator is definitely confusing in Haskell I generally think of it as a sort of open-ended parentheses that encloses the rest of the line. Instead of a backward pipe. It means "evaluate everything after this character first then apply the preceding function to it" just like parentheses would. print $ even $ 4 * 2 is equivalent to print ( even ( 4 * 2 ))
  - brianberns 7y ago
    You're right, and that's why it's usually called "function application" instead of "backward pipe". However, using $ as an operator is confusing because the associativity is ambiguous if you're not already comfortable with it.

ratww 7y ago

I've been using Haskell on and off for almost ten years, and the "front end" of the language, including its syntax, is pretty much the only thing that I absolutely hate about it. The endless operators, all the language extensions required in 2019, the madness called Template Haskell, the absurdity of point free style, the multiple ways of achieving things by cleverly using . and $, the uncanny valley of do-notation (why does it look different? F# gets it right). It's too easy to be clever. It's too easy to take shortcuts that the next person won't understand. I'm completely fine with the underlying semantics! Lazy evaluation, the majestic typechecker, concepts like monads, functors, lenses. Even when it comes to syntax, I love how functions are declared, the way parenthesis work, currying, all the "simple stuff". I adore all those concepts and apply them to other languages. I long for a Haskell-like language without the stuff I mentioned above. I think the problem is that in Haskell everything feels like an afterthought, everything feels "bolt on" rather than "built in". 99% of the hot stuff is implemented using libraries. That's similar to Lisp and C++, other languages I hate (I also love Lisp parens, but I hate macros). Now that I think about it, I prefer less extensible languages that require adding code to the compiler to extend it: C#, F#, Go, JavaScript.

thesz 7y ago
If you can have better solution to the problem at hand with the library, you will solve it faster. Turnaround time for library is much less than for a compiler. So if language provides a way to solve something with a library instead of compiler, it provides a way for faster path to solution.

excursionist 7y ago

Haskell syntax is great except for the indentation/layout rules. There is no simple definition of the grammar with regards to the layout. It's only specified as a headache-inducting operation of a state machine [1], and the implementation is quite hard to read. This is fine for writing Haskell, but quite painful if you want to parse it. [1]https://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/haskell2010/haskellch10.html#x17-17800010.3 https://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/haskell2010/haskellch10...