4 ms·

"I'm convinced that if only we could get a word in with management, and explain what a monad is, they'd consider using Haskell" Not an actual quote, but I like

by davidw 6y ago

"I'm convinced that if only we could get a word in with management, and explain what a monad is, they'd consider using Haskell" Not an actual quote, but I liked the scene it brought to mind.

javajosh 6y ago
Haskell is the ultimate shibboleth. It's value for actual programming is secondary.
- klodolph 6y ago
  I’d say that the value of Haskell is in all of the lessons we learn from the research that it enables. Language designers are constantly looking to languages like Haskell for well thought-out / sound features they can add to make programming easier in other languages. I’m not sure why, but Haskell is an amazing hotbed for experimentation with new language features. You don’t have to use Haskell directly to benefit from it. Saying that it’s a shibboleth—well, that’s kind of a crass way to dismiss an entire community. It’s rude and not insightful.
  - javajosh 6y ago
    If you want vengeance and to show me the error of my rude, crass ways, then write some great software in Haskell.
    - centimeter 6y ago
      Allowing for your (silly) premise, I use XMonad and Pandoc all the time and they are great. Of course, the quality of a language is at best weakly correlated, and at worst anticorrelated, with the amount of useful software that is written using it.
    - klodolph 6y ago
      I’m not trying to “get vengeance” or “show you the error of your ways”. Your comment was dismissive, and I’m pointing it out because if nobody responds to people making rude comments, other people will think it’s okay to make comments like yours.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      The error of your rudeness has nothing to do with whether great software exists written in Haskell (which, of course, it—including , but not limited to, pandoc and PostgREST—does.)
- centimeter 6y ago
  It used to be a very precise indicator of technical competence/interest, but grifters have caught onto this and now there are several of them in the Haskell world. It's still a good indicator, but seems to be getting less predictive over time.
- gen220 6y ago
  I agree with you, although I read your statements as disjoint, as opposed to conditional. I think the “secondary” value it has created is immense. I’m not a Haskell programmer by any stretch, but thinking in terms of concepts evangelized by Haskell (isolating side effects, first class functions, monads) has totally changed the way many people design systems in conventional programming languages.
  - javajosh 6y ago
    > concepts popularized by Haskell... So, this may be a learning opportunity for me, but I thought the idea of separating out side-effects at the process boundary is a very old idea. The same for "first class functions". Haskell was invented around 1985. Lisp was 1958, Smalltalk 1972. Besides, isn't Haskell fundamentally about about lazy evaluation and rigorous type safety?
    - gen220 6y ago
      Yes, the concepts are pretty old. For a lot of people newer to programming, Haskell is the first language that compels them to be understood. That’s what I meant by “popularized”, to clarify. Changed it now to “evangelized”, to make the comment more clear. I’d typed a whole paragraph on LISP, but deleted it because I’ve seen that whole regurgitation of history play out so many times on HN. :) My comment was looking at Haskell as the standard bearer for FP, but it’s not of course. I agree that lazy evaluation and rigorous type safety are what Haskell is best known for nowadays, especially since its less controversial components have found their way into most conventional programming languages by now.
    - klodolph 6y ago
      Haskell enforces function purity (side effect isolation) using the type system. This is relatively novel, neither Lisp nor Smalltalk did it or even tried to do it, as far as I can tell. You could put together lazy values in Lisp manually but Haskell made the entire language lazy by default, and as a result, you couldn’t reliably sequence I/O operations if you tried to “cheat” the type system by giving pure type signatures to functions with side effects. The result was (eventually, in Haskell 1.3) the modern IO monad. If you were using Lisp or ML, you could write pure code in the core of your program but fall back to impure code wherever you liked, because purity was not ever enforced. This explains why nobody really used stuff like monads in Lisp or ML—it wasn’t practically useful, because you could always just write impure code. > Besides, isn't Haskell fundamentally about about lazy evaluation and rigorous type safety? I’d say—no, absolutely not. It’s not about either of those things. “Rigorous type safety” is kind of an ill-defined concept. I’d say Java has rigorous type safety, but it’s very different from Haskell. The lessons from Haskell is that function purity (side effect isolation) is incredibly useful, and laziness is the historical reason why functions in Haskell had to be annotated with the correct types—because a "print :: String -> ()" would not work in Haskell. In other words, the fact that Haskell uses lazy evaluation forced the development of type system capable of expressing side effects and sequential operations, and now that we’ve discovered how to do that, we could discard the lazy part and make an eager version of Haskell. Some people have done that, there are a couple eager variants of Haskell out there. They are very recognizably Haskell. There are a couple other cool things that came out of Haskell’s purity, like software transactional memory. Haskell didn’t invent STM, just like it didn’t invent purity, but Haskell is still the one major success story for STM. The lesson from trying to port STM to other languages is that Haskell’s purity is what made it successful there. Lazy evaluation, in a sense, is just the thing that breaks your program if your functions are not pure, keeping you honest.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Haskell is the ultimate shibboleth. For...what group? I mean, any language can be trivially seen as a shibboleth for the language community, but that's not worth falling our for any language specially over others.
randombaseball 6y ago
I'd like to add that there's also a large Discord community for Haskellers here that's friendly to beginners: https://discord.gg/7meVVxA https://discord.gg/7meVVxA
- TheMatten 6y ago
  And for longer discussions and regular meetups, there's FP Zulip: funprog.zulipchat.com
bogdanoff_2 6y ago
That's not even that much of a stretch. Consider: "I'm convinced that if only we could get a word in with management, and explain what [buzzword] is, they'd consider using [technology]"

by davidw 6y ago

"I'm convinced that if only we could get a word in with management, and explain what a monad is, they'd consider using Haskell" Not an actual quote, but I liked the scene it brought to mind.

javajosh 6y ago

Haskell is the ultimate shibboleth. It's value for actual programming is secondary.

klodolph 6y ago
I’d say that the value of Haskell is in all of the lessons we learn from the research that it enables. Language designers are constantly looking to languages like Haskell for well thought-out / sound features they can add to make programming easier in other languages. I’m not sure why, but Haskell is an amazing hotbed for experimentation with new language features. You don’t have to use Haskell directly to benefit from it. Saying that it’s a shibboleth—well, that’s kind of a crass way to dismiss an entire community. It’s rude and not insightful.
- javajosh 6y ago
  If you want vengeance and to show me the error of my rude, crass ways, then write some great software in Haskell.
  - centimeter 6y ago
    Allowing for your (silly) premise, I use XMonad and Pandoc all the time and they are great. Of course, the quality of a language is at best weakly correlated, and at worst anticorrelated, with the amount of useful software that is written using it.
  - klodolph 6y ago
    I’m not trying to “get vengeance” or “show you the error of your ways”. Your comment was dismissive, and I’m pointing it out because if nobody responds to people making rude comments, other people will think it’s okay to make comments like yours.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    The error of your rudeness has nothing to do with whether great software exists written in Haskell (which, of course, it—including , but not limited to, pandoc and PostgREST—does.)
centimeter 6y ago
It used to be a very precise indicator of technical competence/interest, but grifters have caught onto this and now there are several of them in the Haskell world. It's still a good indicator, but seems to be getting less predictive over time.
gen220 6y ago
I agree with you, although I read your statements as disjoint, as opposed to conditional. I think the “secondary” value it has created is immense. I’m not a Haskell programmer by any stretch, but thinking in terms of concepts evangelized by Haskell (isolating side effects, first class functions, monads) has totally changed the way many people design systems in conventional programming languages.
- javajosh 6y ago
  > concepts popularized by Haskell... So, this may be a learning opportunity for me, but I thought the idea of separating out side-effects at the process boundary is a very old idea. The same for "first class functions". Haskell was invented around 1985. Lisp was 1958, Smalltalk 1972. Besides, isn't Haskell fundamentally about about lazy evaluation and rigorous type safety?
  - gen220 6y ago
    Yes, the concepts are pretty old. For a lot of people newer to programming, Haskell is the first language that compels them to be understood. That’s what I meant by “popularized”, to clarify. Changed it now to “evangelized”, to make the comment more clear. I’d typed a whole paragraph on LISP, but deleted it because I’ve seen that whole regurgitation of history play out so many times on HN. :) My comment was looking at Haskell as the standard bearer for FP, but it’s not of course. I agree that lazy evaluation and rigorous type safety are what Haskell is best known for nowadays, especially since its less controversial components have found their way into most conventional programming languages by now.
  - klodolph 6y ago
    Haskell enforces function purity (side effect isolation) using the type system. This is relatively novel, neither Lisp nor Smalltalk did it or even tried to do it, as far as I can tell. You could put together lazy values in Lisp manually but Haskell made the entire language lazy by default, and as a result, you couldn’t reliably sequence I/O operations if you tried to “cheat” the type system by giving pure type signatures to functions with side effects. The result was (eventually, in Haskell 1.3) the modern IO monad. If you were using Lisp or ML, you could write pure code in the core of your program but fall back to impure code wherever you liked, because purity was not ever enforced. This explains why nobody really used stuff like monads in Lisp or ML—it wasn’t practically useful, because you could always just write impure code. > Besides, isn't Haskell fundamentally about about lazy evaluation and rigorous type safety? I’d say—no, absolutely not. It’s not about either of those things. “Rigorous type safety” is kind of an ill-defined concept. I’d say Java has rigorous type safety, but it’s very different from Haskell. The lessons from Haskell is that function purity (side effect isolation) is incredibly useful, and laziness is the historical reason why functions in Haskell had to be annotated with the correct types—because a "print :: String -> ()" would not work in Haskell. In other words, the fact that Haskell uses lazy evaluation forced the development of type system capable of expressing side effects and sequential operations, and now that we’ve discovered how to do that, we could discard the lazy part and make an eager version of Haskell. Some people have done that, there are a couple eager variants of Haskell out there. They are very recognizably Haskell. There are a couple other cool things that came out of Haskell’s purity, like software transactional memory. Haskell didn’t invent STM, just like it didn’t invent purity, but Haskell is still the one major success story for STM. The lesson from trying to port STM to other languages is that Haskell’s purity is what made it successful there. Lazy evaluation, in a sense, is just the thing that breaks your program if your functions are not pure, keeping you honest.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Haskell is the ultimate shibboleth. For...what group? I mean, any language can be trivially seen as a shibboleth for the language community, but that's not worth falling our for any language specially over others.

randombaseball 6y ago

I'd like to add that there's also a large Discord community for Haskellers here that's friendly to beginners: https://discord.gg/7meVVxA https://discord.gg/7meVVxA

TheMatten 6y ago
And for longer discussions and regular meetups, there's FP Zulip: funprog.zulipchat.com

bogdanoff_2 6y ago

That's not even that much of a stretch. Consider: "I'm convinced that if only we could get a word in with management, and explain what [buzzword] is, they'd consider using [technology]"