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So the article goes on to mention a few individual features of the language which are good features and would definitely be appreciated by those that have alrea
by Zhyl 6y ago
So the article goes on to mention a few individual features of the language which are good features and would definitely be appreciated by those that have already seriously committed to learning and using it, but are pretty opaque to an outsider.
The real killer feature of Haskell is that it is the closest language to mathematics and makes reasoning mathematically much easier than even other functional languages.
Superficially, the syntax has more similarity to mathematical definitions and statements, the conventions (like single letter variables) are borrowed from mathematics and don't feel ugly or forced. Lack of side effects, composition, currying etc and other functional benefits much more neatly line up with how functions are treated in maths.
Ultimately it's still a programming language, and is used much more for traditional engineering or compsci applications than something like Maple or Mathematica would be in Mathematics research, but nonetheless the main draw of Haskell is that it will feel like a home away from home for mathematicians and not because of 5 features noted in this article.
- gimboland 6y ago> The real killer feature of Haskell is that it is the closest language to mathematics and makes reasoning mathematically much easier than even other functional languages. And the reason is it's like that is its focus on purity.
- Zhyl 6y agoIs the reason it's easy to reason with mathematically because it was designed to be pure or is it pure because it was designed to be easy to reason with mathematically?
- ghostwriter 6y agoI think the point is that the language has to have a comprehensive runtime if it wants to have a mathematical(-like) notation in its syntax and to be efficient. Implementing such a runtime is a very hard engineering task, and GHC's runtime is the feature that I appreciate equally to its comprehensive type system.
- whateveracct 6y agoGHC's RTS (and optimizations/codegen too) is really great. I have a b/g in CompE and hardware but I mostly do FP now, so the RTS is the perfect fusion of those two. It's the area to find answers to "how do we efficiently evaluate lambda calculus?"
- Rochus 6y ago> that it is the closest language to mathematics and makes reasoning mathematically much easier than even other functional languages Closer than e.g. Lean?
- Zhyl 6y agoNo, although I don't think you'd try to make a website backend in lean.