3 ms·
I'm trying to say that whatever makes Haskell unpopular, it's not its declarative nature. Whoever manages to make a purely declarative general-purpose programm
by otabdeveloper4 7y ago
I'm trying to say that whatever makes Haskell unpopular, it's not its declarative nature.
Whoever manages to make a purely declarative general-purpose programming language will be a technological superstar, because for normal non-programmer folks it would be the ideal gateway to programming.
(That said, I don't think it's possible. 'General purpose' implies some sort of Turing completeness, i.e., recursion or loops, which immediately makes it impossible to reason about in normal declarative terms.)
- pjc50 7y agoYou would have to add some kind of statefulness, which I suspect is the thing that those people are having trouble reasoning about (and which is also an argument for making things immutable even in imperative languages!). "Statecharts"? Some other kind of boxes-and-arrows Moore/Mealy machine visualisation?
- wwright 7y agoI think we can be a little more optimistic than that. I agree that it’s probably a white whale to try to build a language which is fully declarative 100% of the time, but if we can make something that is simple and declarative 80% of the time, but falls back to something as graceful as Python for the other 20%, that may be enough to have a really big impact.