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I think serious $language people for any $language skew smart and capable. I'm not sure that the top 10% in any language (by whatever metric you choose to measu

I think serious $language people for any $language skew smart and capable. I'm not sure that the top 10% in any language (by whatever metric you choose to measure overall quality) are going to be significant more or less smart and capable than in any other language. Disclaimer: I have minimal exposure to Haskell or Haskell programmers, so this opinion is predicated upon my experience with programmers of many other languages, not Haskell in particular, so I could be completely wrong.

benreesman 5y ago
Yeah I have no particular axe to grind on Haskell’s behalf. I’m a Lisp guy who has to write C++ all day like everyone else. Lazy is a ridiculous default, the combinatorial explosion created by GHC extensions makes C compiler quirks look like a gentle massage in comparison, and building Haskell is a friggin migraine on wheels. But for whatever reason, those folks are on average in my experience, serious as a heart attack.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  I'll take your word for it then, since I have seen similar opinions expressed before, but when you say "serious" what particular qualities are you thinking about?
  - benreesman 5y ago
    See a problem, realize it’s a graph, realize it’s traveling salesman, reduce it to 3SAT, and start grinding it out in MiniSAT before I can type “jupyter lab”.
    - eru 5y ago
      That's not particularly Haskell specific. What's more Haskell specific is recognizing many problems can be solved easier when seen through the lens of parsers, interpreters and/or compilers. Haskell's and the whole ML family of languages are great at writing parsers etc. In fact they were originally invented for implementing other languages.
      - CactusOnFire 5y ago
        I have always figured the appeal of Haskell, Clojure, et al., is to transpile your task and turn any software problem into your language of choice.
        eru 5y ago
        Yes, though that's related, but not really want I wanted to say. I meant that solving a problem in Haskell can often mean eg writing something a bit like a parser.
- eru 5y ago
  Lazy made historical sense as a default: it forced them to deal with side-effects properly. For a new language I would suggest that without annotation, only pure, total functions are allowed. Haskell makes you annotate side-effecting functions with a tag (like IO). But it allows divergent and partial functions just fine. That's why they can't just remove the laziness. I propose that the latter would also need a tag. The nice thing about total functions is that the choice between evaluation orders becomes purely a matter of optimization, and won't change anything about semantics. Some languages like Agda already do something a bit like this. (Also note that total functions are not Turing complete. But that's a feature, not a bug.)
- beanjuiceII 5y ago
  ever check this out? https://github.com/Kindelia/HVM https://github.com/Kindelia/HVM
eru 5y ago
> I'm not sure that the top 10% in any language (by whatever metric you choose to measure overall quality) are going to be significant more or less smart and capable than in any other language. Eh, I'm fairly sure the top 10% of people who liked the bad old PHP were still fairly moronic. (Facebook gave PHP a nice revamp, so it's a much nicer language these days.) For another example, have a look at newLISP. Especially http://www.newlisp.org/MemoryManagement.html http://www.newlisp.org/MemoryManagement.html However, I agree with your point on average in general for most languages.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  >liked That's not really the issue though. I said top 10% by some measure of quality. Whether not the top 10% of PHP programmers liked the language is a separate variable from their levels of competence & intelligence as compared to some other language.
  - eru 5y ago
    My formulation was a bit sloppy. Just assume I wrote about the top 10% of people using bad old PHP. Yes, there were some smart people forced to use it. But they were perhaps enough to drive up the top 2%, not so much the top 10%.

benreesman 5y ago

Yeah I have no particular axe to grind on Haskell’s behalf. I’m a Lisp guy who has to write C++ all day like everyone else. Lazy is a ridiculous default, the combinatorial explosion created by GHC extensions makes C compiler quirks look like a gentle massage in comparison, and building Haskell is a friggin migraine on wheels. But for whatever reason, those folks are on average in my experience, serious as a heart attack.

ineedasername 5y ago
I'll take your word for it then, since I have seen similar opinions expressed before, but when you say "serious" what particular qualities are you thinking about?
- benreesman 5y ago
  See a problem, realize it’s a graph, realize it’s traveling salesman, reduce it to 3SAT, and start grinding it out in MiniSAT before I can type “jupyter lab”.
  - eru 5y ago
    That's not particularly Haskell specific. What's more Haskell specific is recognizing many problems can be solved easier when seen through the lens of parsers, interpreters and/or compilers. Haskell's and the whole ML family of languages are great at writing parsers etc. In fact they were originally invented for implementing other languages.
    - CactusOnFire 5y ago
      I have always figured the appeal of Haskell, Clojure, et al., is to transpile your task and turn any software problem into your language of choice.
      - eru 5y ago
        Yes, though that's related, but not really want I wanted to say. I meant that solving a problem in Haskell can often mean eg writing something a bit like a parser.
eru 5y ago
Lazy made historical sense as a default: it forced them to deal with side-effects properly. For a new language I would suggest that without annotation, only pure, total functions are allowed. Haskell makes you annotate side-effecting functions with a tag (like IO). But it allows divergent and partial functions just fine. That's why they can't just remove the laziness. I propose that the latter would also need a tag. The nice thing about total functions is that the choice between evaluation orders becomes purely a matter of optimization, and won't change anything about semantics. Some languages like Agda already do something a bit like this. (Also note that total functions are not Turing complete. But that's a feature, not a bug.)
beanjuiceII 5y ago
ever check this out? https://github.com/Kindelia/HVM https://github.com/Kindelia/HVM

eru 5y ago

> I'm not sure that the top 10% in any language (by whatever metric you choose to measure overall quality) are going to be significant more or less smart and capable than in any other language. Eh, I'm fairly sure the top 10% of people who liked the bad old PHP were still fairly moronic. (Facebook gave PHP a nice revamp, so it's a much nicer language these days.) For another example, have a look at newLISP. Especially http://www.newlisp.org/MemoryManagement.html http://www.newlisp.org/MemoryManagement.html However, I agree with your point on average in general for most languages.

ineedasername 5y ago
>liked That's not really the issue though. I said top 10% by some measure of quality. Whether not the top 10% of PHP programmers liked the language is a separate variable from their levels of competence & intelligence as compared to some other language.
- eru 5y ago
  My formulation was a bit sloppy. Just assume I wrote about the top 10% of people using bad old PHP. Yes, there were some smart people forced to use it. But they were perhaps enough to drive up the top 2%, not so much the top 10%.