4 ms·

Well, to my mind the fact that Haskell has a large amount of mind share in academia and smart programmers, has been around for decades and there is very little

by patrec 7y ago

Well, to my mind the fact that Haskell has a large amount of mind share in academia and smart programmers, has been around for decades and there is very little to show for it[*] that I'm aware off makes me think it almost certainly has negative average utility for developing useful software. Why would you think otherwise? I'm not saying it will necessarily have negative utility for your particular problem, or that the negative utility it has might not be a cost worth swallowing in order to hire some really smart programmers who happen to like it.

agumonkey 7y ago
You could argue the opposite too. How many pure fp things from academia managed to even survive out of the publication phase ? I'm not that pro-haskell but I also see how all languages in the last decade shifted toward fp idioms clearly. I mean redux is a fold.
- patrec 7y ago
  I don't understand your argument, in that I really can't see how one can equally argue the opposite. I fully acknowledge that Haskell has been successful as a test bed for PL research, and I also think Haskell is an interesting language worth studying. It is also true that FP ideas have increasingly bled into mainstream languages over the past two decades. But that does in no way imply that Haskell is in any way a good general choice for writing useful software. And although a lot of practically useful stuff has come out of Haskell-land (property based testing, for example), it's not even obvious to me that Haskell has been a huge part of the shift to more FP-y idioms (compared, to say, scheme or SML). Your own example, fold, has been around decades before Haskell.
  - agumonkey 7y ago
    What can I say, I didn't read why es6, php or cpp lifted closures into the language. I consider this is pure FP influence which haskell is the most known instance. And yeah scheme and sml were prior art, but sml is not even on the map of PL choices (I saw it mentionned in rust history, but I think it's mostly the eager semantics, otherwise you could replace it with any pure FP language)
    - pron 7y ago
      Oh, I would happily admit that Haskell has had some influence on languages -- as expected from a research language.
    - patrec 7y ago
      What do you mean with es6 lifted closures into the language? As far as I remember, closures have been in JS right from the start (and given that Brendan Eich joined mozilla to "do scheme in the browser", we can be pretty sure where they came from). ES6 just added a more lightweight syntax. I agree that SML isn't even on the map, in terms of practical programming language choices (one of the most hilariously titled CS books of all time must _ML for the working programmer_ where the final "real project" chapters consist of writing such working programer perennials as a lambda calculus interpreter and a theorem prover). And I believe that even scheme is less suited to write almost any type of practical software than Haskell. But that's precisely my point: a language having a positive influence on the state of applied programming does not mean that it is actually a good choice for solving practical problems with. And vice versa.
      - agumonkey 7y ago
        You're right, I just meant the lexical closure syntax (..) => (giving a clear fp feel to the language by promoting closure syntactically). and this is part of a wide move from all dyn langs to lift fp features like destructuring. es6 was just one tiny point that I had in mind when commenting above. btw I love sml. I'm just being realist about it's mainstream existence. Lastly, it's as if you consider haskell as proof of concept and nothing more. I don't see any real hurdles why haskell is less practical than typescript (except the fact that TS relies on the years of js project they can compile and interop with)
        patrec 7y ago
        How about: a typical typescript project does not start off with a dozen compiler pragmas non-trivially changing language semantics? Or: no matter their background, it will take at least 10x more time to spin up new developers with Haskell than typescript?

by patrec 7y ago

agumonkey 7y ago

You could argue the opposite too. How many pure fp things from academia managed to even survive out of the publication phase ? I'm not that pro-haskell but I also see how all languages in the last decade shifted toward fp idioms clearly. I mean redux is a fold.

patrec 7y ago
I don't understand your argument, in that I really can't see how one can equally argue the opposite. I fully acknowledge that Haskell has been successful as a test bed for PL research, and I also think Haskell is an interesting language worth studying. It is also true that FP ideas have increasingly bled into mainstream languages over the past two decades. But that does in no way imply that Haskell is in any way a good general choice for writing useful software. And although a lot of practically useful stuff has come out of Haskell-land (property based testing, for example), it's not even obvious to me that Haskell has been a huge part of the shift to more FP-y idioms (compared, to say, scheme or SML). Your own example, fold, has been around decades before Haskell.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  What can I say, I didn't read why es6, php or cpp lifted closures into the language. I consider this is pure FP influence which haskell is the most known instance. And yeah scheme and sml were prior art, but sml is not even on the map of PL choices (I saw it mentionned in rust history, but I think it's mostly the eager semantics, otherwise you could replace it with any pure FP language)
  - pron 7y ago
    Oh, I would happily admit that Haskell has had some influence on languages -- as expected from a research language.
  - patrec 7y ago
    What do you mean with es6 lifted closures into the language? As far as I remember, closures have been in JS right from the start (and given that Brendan Eich joined mozilla to "do scheme in the browser", we can be pretty sure where they came from). ES6 just added a more lightweight syntax. I agree that SML isn't even on the map, in terms of practical programming language choices (one of the most hilariously titled CS books of all time must _ML for the working programmer_ where the final "real project" chapters consist of writing such working programer perennials as a lambda calculus interpreter and a theorem prover). And I believe that even scheme is less suited to write almost any type of practical software than Haskell. But that's precisely my point: a language having a positive influence on the state of applied programming does not mean that it is actually a good choice for solving practical problems with. And vice versa.
    - agumonkey 7y ago
      You're right, I just meant the lexical closure syntax (..) => (giving a clear fp feel to the language by promoting closure syntactically). and this is part of a wide move from all dyn langs to lift fp features like destructuring. es6 was just one tiny point that I had in mind when commenting above. btw I love sml. I'm just being realist about it's mainstream existence. Lastly, it's as if you consider haskell as proof of concept and nothing more. I don't see any real hurdles why haskell is less practical than typescript (except the fact that TS relies on the years of js project they can compile and interop with)
      - patrec 7y ago
        How about: a typical typescript project does not start off with a dozen compiler pragmas non-trivially changing language semantics? Or: no matter their background, it will take at least 10x more time to spin up new developers with Haskell than typescript?