4 ms·

So if erlang and clojure are superior but tragically underused in spite of having some big projects/tools to show, how is it helpful for haskell to try to have

by dudul 6y ago

So if erlang and clojure are superior but tragically underused in spite of having some big projects/tools to show, how is it helpful for haskell to try to have one as well?

javajosh 6y ago
First, I've made no pretense about speaking for Haskell's interests, I am speaking strictly about my own wishes. While I think our interests are aligned, I'll let you be the judge. What would be good for me as a curious developer interested in the language, and who has had a years-long low-level FOMO about it, I would like to be able to wade in and do something with it, like I did with Clojure and Erlang, confident that I could, in the end, make it do stuff (since others had already made it do stuff, first). I do really honestly believe that Haskell needs a "paragon project" like Matrix or Jepsen that has proven itself useful to the world without respect to its Haskellness, and then show that this solution was much easier in Haskell. I keep getting down-voted on this thread, and I expect it to continue. Friends thought I was nuts to give up on Lost after season 1, or The Hobbit after movie 1, or the GoT books after book 3. After years of hearing much talk and seeing no walk, I'm giving up on Haskell. More than that, I'm going to call out anyone talking it up to give specifics because literally everyone I've every spoken to about it gives it a very high regard, but have never, ever written a line of it.
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  > literally everyone I've every spoken to about it gives it a very high regard, but have never, ever written a line of it. It's fine to make silly hyperbolic statements in a language war, but when you are trying to present yourself as the voice of reason.
reikonomusha 6y ago
I think I understand the sentiment of the above commenter. I feel it with Lisp too. There are amazing claims about how Haskell (or Lisp or Erlang or ...) give you these amazing superpowers and allow you to write immensely more correct programs immensely faster. That could be true (and I personally do believe it’s true). But then where are all of these immensely-correct fast-written programs? I don’t buy the pg-inspired secret-weapon lurking-in-the-shadows argument unfortunately. In C, C++, Java, and Python—even Pascal!—it’s not even funny how many examples there are. It’s nearly limitless. The superpower languages struggle to come up with just a handful of examples. What I personally observe in the Lisp and Haskell world is that people like to write purportedly useful “reusable” libraries, and nobody likes to write applications. A very select few are successful at these libraries (where success = broad adoption), but most of these libraries are intellectual games and puzzles that benefit almost zero “working programmers”. Lisp has plenty of libraries to do pattern matching (great!) but basically zero for putting up a native GUI. (As a self-deprecating anecdote, my first instinct writing Haskell many moons ago was to create a library of all of the major abstract algebraic structures found in pure math. You can imagine how many people that library would benefit.) A lot of this also has to do with not the language, but the tribal nature of programmers and their acceptance of other tools in their chain. The Linux kernel will never accept a patch written in Common Lisp, and a lousy middle manager will never let you write your domain logic in Prolog. Nobody wants to figure out how to integrate GHC into their CI/CD. Most people have little patience to figure out how to write good C code that integrates with Erlang’s FFI. I’m being a little flippant in my description of the state of affairs, but I think the spirit of it is correct. I think the commenter is right. If any of these languages will be successful, there have to be many, many successful programs written in said language where the language’s benefits tangibly pay off. Having one or two Hail Mary projects doesn’t really mean anything.
- tome 6y ago
  Well, yes, to become popular a language has to become popular. It's a tricky knot to cut, but we're working on it.
  - reikonomusha 6y ago
    Even the way you state this I feel is being dismissive of an important aspect of reality. I don’t think popularity is the root issue. It’s not that it has to become popular, it’s that the people who use the language have to write useful things in it. Almost zero people writing lens libraries in C, almost no people are writing state-of-the-art asymptotically optimal Cool Tree data structures in C++. Almost all users of these languages are writing an application that isn’t designed to serve the intellectual needs of the programmer themself.
    - tome 6y ago
      Hmm, well, it seems to me that if a language is not globally popular there will not be many jobs in it, so thing things that get written in it will be those things that are personally interesting to the authors. I don't think that necessarily speaks to the unsuitability of that language for personally uninteresting things. I thought your point about bootstrapping to popularity was a good one. It's not easy but I'm convinced that Haskell is good enough that it's possible (in fact I think it's inevitable that either some Haskellish language will become popular or some popular language will become Haskellish).
    - klodolph 6y ago
      My impression of Haskell is that (1) people who use Haskell as a hobby often write libraries to show off (2) people who use Haskell professionally write proprietary software. One of the problems with languages like Haskell, Erlang, and Lisp is that they’re so flexible that you often don’t know what you’re getting into when you read somebody else’s codebase. You often see projects written in these languages with a small core team that understands e.g. SBCL and the various macro libraries they use to get work done, or Haskell and the monad transformer stack they use in their app, and it’s very hard over the long-term to on-board new team members and bring them up to speed at a rate which keeps the team healthy. Maybe this is an inherent problem with “flexible/powerful” languages. There are a few Haskell tools around that people do regularly use—Git Annex, although Git LFS seems to have edged it out in popularity, and Pandoc, which I’d say is powerful and irreplaceable. Maybe zero people are writing lens libraries in C, but C does have a fair number of different string libraries around, exception / error handling libraries, and a bunch of people churning out terrible “single-header” libraries which only exist because average C programmers aren’t good at working with common, mediocre C build systems.

by dudul 6y ago

So if erlang and clojure are superior but tragically underused in spite of having some big projects/tools to show, how is it helpful for haskell to try to have one as well?

javajosh 6y ago

First, I've made no pretense about speaking for Haskell's interests, I am speaking strictly about my own wishes. While I think our interests are aligned, I'll let you be the judge. What would be good for me as a curious developer interested in the language, and who has had a years-long low-level FOMO about it, I would like to be able to wade in and do something with it, like I did with Clojure and Erlang, confident that I could, in the end, make it do stuff (since others had already made it do stuff, first). I do really honestly believe that Haskell needs a "paragon project" like Matrix or Jepsen that has proven itself useful to the world without respect to its Haskellness, and then show that this solution was much easier in Haskell. I keep getting down-voted on this thread, and I expect it to continue. Friends thought I was nuts to give up on Lost after season 1, or The Hobbit after movie 1, or the GoT books after book 3. After years of hearing much talk and seeing no walk, I'm giving up on Haskell. More than that, I'm going to call out anyone talking it up to give specifics because literally everyone I've every spoken to about it gives it a very high regard, but have never, ever written a line of it.

alisonkisk 6y ago
> literally everyone I've every spoken to about it gives it a very high regard, but have never, ever written a line of it. It's fine to make silly hyperbolic statements in a language war, but when you are trying to present yourself as the voice of reason.

reikonomusha 6y ago

I think I understand the sentiment of the above commenter. I feel it with Lisp too. There are amazing claims about how Haskell (or Lisp or Erlang or ...) give you these amazing superpowers and allow you to write immensely more correct programs immensely faster. That could be true (and I personally do believe it’s true). But then where are all of these immensely-correct fast-written programs? I don’t buy the pg-inspired secret-weapon lurking-in-the-shadows argument unfortunately. In C, C++, Java, and Python—even Pascal!—it’s not even funny how many examples there are. It’s nearly limitless. The superpower languages struggle to come up with just a handful of examples. What I personally observe in the Lisp and Haskell world is that people like to write purportedly useful “reusable” libraries, and nobody likes to write applications. A very select few are successful at these libraries (where success = broad adoption), but most of these libraries are intellectual games and puzzles that benefit almost zero “working programmers”. Lisp has plenty of libraries to do pattern matching (great!) but basically zero for putting up a native GUI. (As a self-deprecating anecdote, my first instinct writing Haskell many moons ago was to create a library of all of the major abstract algebraic structures found in pure math. You can imagine how many people that library would benefit.) A lot of this also has to do with not the language, but the tribal nature of programmers and their acceptance of other tools in their chain. The Linux kernel will never accept a patch written in Common Lisp, and a lousy middle manager will never let you write your domain logic in Prolog. Nobody wants to figure out how to integrate GHC into their CI/CD. Most people have little patience to figure out how to write good C code that integrates with Erlang’s FFI. I’m being a little flippant in my description of the state of affairs, but I think the spirit of it is correct. I think the commenter is right. If any of these languages will be successful, there have to be many, many successful programs written in said language where the language’s benefits tangibly pay off. Having one or two Hail Mary projects doesn’t really mean anything.

tome 6y ago
Well, yes, to become popular a language has to become popular. It's a tricky knot to cut, but we're working on it.
- reikonomusha 6y ago
  Even the way you state this I feel is being dismissive of an important aspect of reality. I don’t think popularity is the root issue. It’s not that it has to become popular, it’s that the people who use the language have to write useful things in it. Almost zero people writing lens libraries in C, almost no people are writing state-of-the-art asymptotically optimal Cool Tree data structures in C++. Almost all users of these languages are writing an application that isn’t designed to serve the intellectual needs of the programmer themself.
  - tome 6y ago
    Hmm, well, it seems to me that if a language is not globally popular there will not be many jobs in it, so thing things that get written in it will be those things that are personally interesting to the authors. I don't think that necessarily speaks to the unsuitability of that language for personally uninteresting things. I thought your point about bootstrapping to popularity was a good one. It's not easy but I'm convinced that Haskell is good enough that it's possible (in fact I think it's inevitable that either some Haskellish language will become popular or some popular language will become Haskellish).
  - klodolph 6y ago
    My impression of Haskell is that (1) people who use Haskell as a hobby often write libraries to show off (2) people who use Haskell professionally write proprietary software. One of the problems with languages like Haskell, Erlang, and Lisp is that they’re so flexible that you often don’t know what you’re getting into when you read somebody else’s codebase. You often see projects written in these languages with a small core team that understands e.g. SBCL and the various macro libraries they use to get work done, or Haskell and the monad transformer stack they use in their app, and it’s very hard over the long-term to on-board new team members and bring them up to speed at a rate which keeps the team healthy. Maybe this is an inherent problem with “flexible/powerful” languages. There are a few Haskell tools around that people do regularly use—Git Annex, although Git LFS seems to have edged it out in popularity, and Pandoc, which I’d say is powerful and irreplaceable. Maybe zero people are writing lens libraries in C, but C does have a fair number of different string libraries around, exception / error handling libraries, and a bunch of people churning out terrible “single-header” libraries which only exist because average C programmers aren’t good at working with common, mediocre C build systems.