3 ms·

"It is rather an attempt to get my head around functional programming, and to me Haskell doesn’t seem to have any practical application beyond that." Cardano/A

by martin1975 7y ago

"It is rather an attempt to get my head around functional programming, and to me Haskell doesn’t seem to have any practical application beyond that." Cardano/ADA's core Ouroboros protocol was entirely written, with formal proofs, in Haskell. It is by far the most serious attempt at proof of stake in the crypto industry. I think what you're really saying is, you won't find many jobs out there w/Haskell as a requirement... but I wouldn't go as far as saying Haskell has no purpose past teaching FP. It certainly is the poster child of FP, however it is not without practical/industrial use. You just have to look harder to see where it's being used.

tempestn 7y ago
Or maybe it was just a joke...
javajosh 7y ago
>You just have to look harder to see where it's being used. This is where advocacy slips over the line into a kind of blind faith evangelism -- with an added pinch of pedantry peculiar to our field. I will state without proof that every language ever invented is currently being used for something practical somewhere. E.g. someone has a useful shell utility they wrote in Brainfuck that they run every day and that they love. This does not mean that BF has 'practical application' in the usual sense of the phrase. In the same way, just because there is a real program written in Haskell somewhere does not mean it has practical application. IMHO a language (or a tool in general) should have a community of practitioners that regularly think in and create with the tool, and a good signal that that is happening are the number of open-source releases in that language. I have never in my life installed a Haskell program, or known of anyone installing one. (The exception being this one Haskell fan at JPL who loved talking about the language and the lambda calculas, but to my knowledge, never wrote anything real in it, and he just installed learning toys, not utilities.) All that said, there are some good examples of unpopular tools that enjoyed success later in life. Quaternions lost to vectors historically, but graphics programmers rediscovered their benefits and resurrected them. Maybe Haskell will have it's time, but that time is not now.
- leadingthenet 7y ago
  I'm not sure that holds up. Real people working at real companies are writing real code in Haskell every day. I found several job postings in London that advertised Haskell as a requirement / nice to have. Haskell is also taught and used extensively at my alma matter, and is in fact the first language you will be introduced to at a CS/SE degree. How is that in any way, shape, or form comparable to Brainfuck?!
  - javajosh 7y ago
    When was the last time you installed and/or ran a Haskell program? If the answer is more recent then "never", then what was it? It's possible that Haskell is like COBOL in that it's used in industry but not at all by the community. But I'm not sure how I would characterize it, then. Does industry use count as "practical"? I honestly don't know. Anyway, examples would be nice.
    - bigDinosaur 7y ago
      I installed and used Pandoc the other week, and you've likely used it without knowing it (e.g. via web backends) if you don't use it directly. I also use it for Elm (i.e. the Elm compiler) almost every day.
    - chii 7y ago
      And what is "the community"? Haskell indeed has less penetration than something more popular like JavaScript. But the Haskell language is not easy to use if you're a script-kiddy. Most "easy" languages can have some form of copy-paste reuse, and a lot of "the community", it would seem, just append together useful snippets to get their programs done (and whether they have a deep understanding or not is not needed). This isn't true for Haskell. It's actually quite hard to just "copy/paste" Haskell without out knowing the underlying concepts. I wager that the reason there seems to be less.of a community in Haskell is due to this property.
      - Hercuros 7y ago
addictedcs 7y ago
The crypto industry at its current stage is far from any practical purpose. It's just unfortunate that "Haskell in Practice" is associated with crypto BS.

tempestn 7y ago

Or maybe it was just a joke...

javajosh 7y ago

>You just have to look harder to see where it's being used. This is where advocacy slips over the line into a kind of blind faith evangelism -- with an added pinch of pedantry peculiar to our field. I will state without proof that every language ever invented is currently being used for something practical somewhere. E.g. someone has a useful shell utility they wrote in Brainfuck that they run every day and that they love. This does not mean that BF has 'practical application' in the usual sense of the phrase. In the same way, just because there is a real program written in Haskell somewhere does not mean it has practical application. IMHO a language (or a tool in general) should have a community of practitioners that regularly think in and create with the tool, and a good signal that that is happening are the number of open-source releases in that language. I have never in my life installed a Haskell program, or known of anyone installing one. (The exception being this one Haskell fan at JPL who loved talking about the language and the lambda calculas, but to my knowledge, never wrote anything real in it, and he just installed learning toys, not utilities.) All that said, there are some good examples of unpopular tools that enjoyed success later in life. Quaternions lost to vectors historically, but graphics programmers rediscovered their benefits and resurrected them. Maybe Haskell will have it's time, but that time is not now.

leadingthenet 7y ago
I'm not sure that holds up. Real people working at real companies are writing real code in Haskell every day. I found several job postings in London that advertised Haskell as a requirement / nice to have. Haskell is also taught and used extensively at my alma matter, and is in fact the first language you will be introduced to at a CS/SE degree. How is that in any way, shape, or form comparable to Brainfuck?!
- javajosh 7y ago
  When was the last time you installed and/or ran a Haskell program? If the answer is more recent then "never", then what was it? It's possible that Haskell is like COBOL in that it's used in industry but not at all by the community. But I'm not sure how I would characterize it, then. Does industry use count as "practical"? I honestly don't know. Anyway, examples would be nice.
  - bigDinosaur 7y ago
    I installed and used Pandoc the other week, and you've likely used it without knowing it (e.g. via web backends) if you don't use it directly. I also use it for Elm (i.e. the Elm compiler) almost every day.
  - chii 7y ago
    And what is "the community"? Haskell indeed has less penetration than something more popular like JavaScript. But the Haskell language is not easy to use if you're a script-kiddy. Most "easy" languages can have some form of copy-paste reuse, and a lot of "the community", it would seem, just append together useful snippets to get their programs done (and whether they have a deep understanding or not is not needed). This isn't true for Haskell. It's actually quite hard to just "copy/paste" Haskell without out knowing the underlying concepts. I wager that the reason there seems to be less.of a community in Haskell is due to this property.
    - Hercuros 7y ago

addictedcs 7y ago

The crypto industry at its current stage is far from any practical purpose. It's just unfortunate that "Haskell in Practice" is associated with crypto BS.