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> Practically the entire field of PL research was swallowed up by FP and continues to be dominated by that paradigm (e.g. dependent types), despite the vast maj

> Practically the entire field of PL research was swallowed up by FP and continues to be dominated by that paradigm (e.g. dependent types), despite the vast majority of PL users being disinterested in them. I couldn't disagree with this more. I'm biased because I really like PL research, but when I look at modern languages like Rust, Haskell's shadow is plain to see. ADTs, immutability and parametric polymorphism for instance.

thu2111 6y ago
I used to agree. These days I think there's a lot of wishful thinking along these lines, as if nobody would have noticed without Haskell that re-using lots of global variables leads to frequent bugs. C++ got the const keyword in 1985, the same year Haskell was born. Templates were proposed in 1986. And would nobody have developed the notion of first-class functions without academic PL research? Given that even C has the notion of function pointers, it's hard to argue that. Rust is hardly related to Haskell. If there's a shadow it's a very small one. Rust's primary research idea is adding linear types to an imperative type system. There's no lazyness, it's not pure, the syntax is obviously C-based and not ML/Haskell based. The similarities to C++ are much stronger than the similarities to Haskell. When I look at the huge quantity of taxpayer money sunk into this line of programming languages, and how much impact it's had, I can't really support it. Academia/Haskell supporters like to lay claim to ideas and argue they "came" from academic PL research, but when you look into the histories and timelines that's just clearly not true. The ideas were either already in development a long time ago, or they were trivial and easily thought of. Meanwhile, like I said - lazyness is now a dead end. I remember one of my CS lecturers who worked on Haskell-related DT research when I was an undergrad. He sang the praises of lazyness, how much better it made everything. They don't think that anymore and new son-of-Haskell langs don't have it. That entire line of PL theory was born, lived and died entirely within the taxpayer funded public sector.

thu2111 6y ago

I used to agree. These days I think there's a lot of wishful thinking along these lines, as if nobody would have noticed without Haskell that re-using lots of global variables leads to frequent bugs. C++ got the const keyword in 1985, the same year Haskell was born. Templates were proposed in 1986. And would nobody have developed the notion of first-class functions without academic PL research? Given that even C has the notion of function pointers, it's hard to argue that. Rust is hardly related to Haskell. If there's a shadow it's a very small one. Rust's primary research idea is adding linear types to an imperative type system. There's no lazyness, it's not pure, the syntax is obviously C-based and not ML/Haskell based. The similarities to C++ are much stronger than the similarities to Haskell. When I look at the huge quantity of taxpayer money sunk into this line of programming languages, and how much impact it's had, I can't really support it. Academia/Haskell supporters like to lay claim to ideas and argue they "came" from academic PL research, but when you look into the histories and timelines that's just clearly not true. The ideas were either already in development a long time ago, or they were trivial and easily thought of. Meanwhile, like I said - lazyness is now a dead end. I remember one of my CS lecturers who worked on Haskell-related DT research when I was an undergrad. He sang the praises of lazyness, how much better it made everything. They don't think that anymore and new son-of-Haskell langs don't have it. That entire line of PL theory was born, lived and died entirely within the taxpayer funded public sector.