4 ms·

You either think the astronomical number of bugs in delivered software is a problem or you don't (and good luck with that). The use of Haskell is a huge win on

by harry8 6y ago

You either think the astronomical number of bugs in delivered software is a problem or you don't (and good luck with that). The use of Haskell is a huge win on this metric and demonstrably so. You don't have bugs in any of the Haskell programmed OSes you actually use, nor your editor written in Haskell, your Haskell mp3 player nor your Haskell time machine and Haskell en-truthenator. Pandoc is good. Some like xmonad window manager, git-annexe has some fans. There's probably 4 or 5 more too! Mostly centred around parsing. And for all that you absolutely should learn Haskell. You'll enjoy it and it will enable you to think about programming in New and powerful ways. Just don't fall so deep you expect to actually ship anything you write.

thom 6y ago
The only Haskell software I regularly interact with is Hasura, and it has plenty of bugs (even ones around nulls and other things Haskell is supposed to magic away).
jbjbjbjb 6y ago
I wish functional advocates would stop saying this, it just isn’t true. There any many types of bugs and Haskell may help prevent some of those.
tchaffee 6y ago
> You either think the astronomical number of bugs in delivered software is a problem or you don't (and good luck with that). We don't need luck. Competition has already given us the answer that most bugs are ok. The vast majority of the software that creates literally trillions of dollars of economic activity, and pays most of our bills, is not mission critical. Software fails all the time with the only significant consequence being a developer has to spend some time fixing it. Sure sometimes money is lost. So is money lost when factory equipment needs repair. Some software does deserve to be bug free when it might put lives at risk, like flight software or medical software. Perhaps even operating systems. But the vast majority of the software I use on a day to day basis does not fit that category. What significant harm does a bug in VS Code or Slack or even my OS cause me? None. If bug free software gave a significant economic competitive advantage, smart folks would start writing it and win big in the marketplace. Considering this has had decades to happen, and has not, it's very unlikely that bug free is the winning competitive advantage when it comes to software. I'd guess the winning advantage is that the software is useful. Much like a car with many small problems is still useful. The truth is that much of the software that exists today simply would not be worth building bug free and would never be profitable. You can extend this outside of software development to see that it's true in a more general sense. Most of the manufactured products we buy are not perfect and do not last forever. Some even have flaws from the day you buy them, but flaws that can be worked around. Once on vacation I bought screwdriver at a dollar store. Poorly manufactured and it does have "bugs" compared to something I would have paid 10x the price for. But years later I still have it and it's good enough for some jobs. You could potentially build a car that doesn't fail for any reason for a few hundred years. Only Bezos and friends could afford it. With that said, I'd like to see the negative externalities of pollution and waste included in the true cost of things we buy, so that we don't produce so many disposable things that society pays for in the long run. But that's a different discussion. Please don't take this to mean that I don't take great pride in writing quality software that is as bug free as possible. I do. I also take great pride in meeting budget goals and deadlines. All successful businesses understand that competing goals must be balanced against each other.
- tome 6y ago
  A well thought out reply, thank you. Haskellers would typically agree with you. Unfortunately harry8 who you were replying to isn't one. He was being sarcastic.
lukashrb 6y ago
I wonder is there any good research/data for this claim correlation between bugs and used language. I know there is some for development practices but it's independent from the language used.
- tarleb 6y ago
  You might like these: An Empirical study on the impact of static typing on software maintainability, Stefan Hanenberg, Sebastian Kleinschmager, Romain Robbes, Éric Tanter, Andreas Stefik/. Empir Software Eng, (2013-12-11). DOI: 10.1007/s10664-013-9289-1. An Empirical Investigation of the Effects of Type Systems and Code Completion on API Usability using TypeScript and JavaScript in MS Visual Studio. Lars Fischer, Stefan Hanenberg, Proceedings of the 11th Symposium on Dynamic Languages (154--167), 2015. A large-scale study of programming languages and code quality in GitHub. Ray et al., 2014 The TL;DR is: typing matter, but so does tooling. However, programmers in dynamic languages are slightly slower, appear to produce more defects. There is a measurable benefit of static typing, but it's small.
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    The paper by Ray et al. has been harshly criticized (https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3340571 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3340571).
    - jose_zap 6y ago
      Interestingly, in this paper, Haskell displays a negative correlation in defect rate
- p0nce 6y ago
  Economics of Software Quality has a function point to language conversion data, and function point to quality charts, so you could possibly say infer from that.
tome 6y ago
Your respondents don't seem to have realised that you are being sarcastic.
p0nce 6y ago
> The use of Haskell is a huge win on this metric and demonstrably so. So.... where are all the haskell competitors that benefit from this lower bug count? (edit: ah! satire!)

by harry8 6y ago

thom 6y ago

The only Haskell software I regularly interact with is Hasura, and it has plenty of bugs (even ones around nulls and other things Haskell is supposed to magic away).

jbjbjbjb 6y ago

I wish functional advocates would stop saying this, it just isn’t true. There any many types of bugs and Haskell may help prevent some of those.

tchaffee 6y ago

> You either think the astronomical number of bugs in delivered software is a problem or you don't (and good luck with that). We don't need luck. Competition has already given us the answer that most bugs are ok. The vast majority of the software that creates literally trillions of dollars of economic activity, and pays most of our bills, is not mission critical. Software fails all the time with the only significant consequence being a developer has to spend some time fixing it. Sure sometimes money is lost. So is money lost when factory equipment needs repair. Some software does deserve to be bug free when it might put lives at risk, like flight software or medical software. Perhaps even operating systems. But the vast majority of the software I use on a day to day basis does not fit that category. What significant harm does a bug in VS Code or Slack or even my OS cause me? None. If bug free software gave a significant economic competitive advantage, smart folks would start writing it and win big in the marketplace. Considering this has had decades to happen, and has not, it's very unlikely that bug free is the winning competitive advantage when it comes to software. I'd guess the winning advantage is that the software is useful. Much like a car with many small problems is still useful. The truth is that much of the software that exists today simply would not be worth building bug free and would never be profitable. You can extend this outside of software development to see that it's true in a more general sense. Most of the manufactured products we buy are not perfect and do not last forever. Some even have flaws from the day you buy them, but flaws that can be worked around. Once on vacation I bought screwdriver at a dollar store. Poorly manufactured and it does have "bugs" compared to something I would have paid 10x the price for. But years later I still have it and it's good enough for some jobs. You could potentially build a car that doesn't fail for any reason for a few hundred years. Only Bezos and friends could afford it. With that said, I'd like to see the negative externalities of pollution and waste included in the true cost of things we buy, so that we don't produce so many disposable things that society pays for in the long run. But that's a different discussion. Please don't take this to mean that I don't take great pride in writing quality software that is as bug free as possible. I do. I also take great pride in meeting budget goals and deadlines. All successful businesses understand that competing goals must be balanced against each other.

tome 6y ago
A well thought out reply, thank you. Haskellers would typically agree with you. Unfortunately harry8 who you were replying to isn't one. He was being sarcastic.

lukashrb 6y ago

I wonder is there any good research/data for this claim correlation between bugs and used language. I know there is some for development practices but it's independent from the language used.

tarleb 6y ago
You might like these: An Empirical study on the impact of static typing on software maintainability, Stefan Hanenberg, Sebastian Kleinschmager, Romain Robbes, Éric Tanter, Andreas Stefik/. Empir Software Eng, (2013-12-11). DOI: 10.1007/s10664-013-9289-1. An Empirical Investigation of the Effects of Type Systems and Code Completion on API Usability using TypeScript and JavaScript in MS Visual Studio. Lars Fischer, Stefan Hanenberg, Proceedings of the 11th Symposium on Dynamic Languages (154--167), 2015. A large-scale study of programming languages and code quality in GitHub. Ray et al., 2014 The TL;DR is: typing matter, but so does tooling. However, programmers in dynamic languages are slightly slower, appear to produce more defects. There is a measurable benefit of static typing, but it's small.
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  The paper by Ray et al. has been harshly criticized (https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3340571 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3340571).
  - jose_zap 6y ago
    Interestingly, in this paper, Haskell displays a negative correlation in defect rate
p0nce 6y ago
Economics of Software Quality has a function point to language conversion data, and function point to quality charts, so you could possibly say infer from that.

tome 6y ago

Your respondents don't seem to have realised that you are being sarcastic.

p0nce 6y ago

> The use of Haskell is a huge win on this metric and demonstrably so. So.... where are all the haskell competitors that benefit from this lower bug count? (edit: ah! satire!)