5 ms·

Because industry makes good decisions? Decisions like adopting python, dooming a large part of the world software to be bug ridden slow messes. Or to elevate CU

Because industry makes good decisions? Decisions like adopting python, dooming a large part of the world software to be bug ridden slow messes. Or to elevate CUDA to the facto machine learning backend? Besides it's not clear that Haskell isn't adopted by industry due to the syntax.

lelanthran 5y ago
> Because industry makes good decisions? That's irrelevant - if you want uptake, you need to support what user's want. It's been clear for at least a decade now that programmers don't want Haskell syntax. Whether it's a good syntax or not is irrelevant.
- rowanG077 5y ago
  Why do you think it's Haskells syntax that is the problem? The syntax is not so weird. I'd say the semantics are the hangup. 100% purity and lazy evaluation are a much harder pill to swallow then the syntax.
  - lelanthran 5y ago
    > Why do you think it's Haskells syntax that is the problem? The syntax is not so weird. I'd say the semantics are the hangup. 100% purity and lazy evaluation are a much harder pill to swallow then the syntax. Could very well be - either way the language has been rejected. Boasting of Haskell characteristics[1] is, IMO, a great way to turn off prospective users. [1] I don't really know if the Nix project actually does blog posts and reachouts where they boast of Haskell-ish similarities.
    - rowanG077 5y ago
      I don't really see that industry has rejected Haskell at all. Haskell target simply wasn't (or isn't) industry. You can't really be rejected if you aren't trying to get into that niche. And Haskell has seen significant industrial use. So they succeeded at something they didn't even want to succeed at.
- nix23 5y ago
  >if you want uptake, you need to support what user's want Before the iPhone no one knew they wanted a good camera and "apps" on their phone. See the important point here -> "knew they wanted"
  - lelanthran 5y ago
    > >if you want uptake, you need to support what user's want > Before the iPhone no one knew they wanted a good camera and "apps" on their phone. > See the important point here -> "knew they wanted" Haskell has been around now for something like 25 years. You'd have a point if the iPhone was unpopular for 25 years before users finally decided to like it. It wasn't. Users saw the iPhone and wanted it the minute they saw it. Programmers have been looking at Haskell for 25 years and rejecting it.
    - nix23 5y ago
      >Programmers have been looking at Haskell for 25 years and rejecting it. I really don't know why you think that true: https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell_in_industry https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell_in_industry And i really don't know why you speak for "programmers", just speak for yourself...maybe?
      - lelanthran 5y ago
        >> Programmers have been looking at Haskell for 25 years and rejecting it. > I really don't know why you think that true: Because it doesn't show up any any metric as having significant usage. A list of 100 companies using it doesn't make the hundreds of millions of other companies not using it go away.
        nix23 5y ago
        Your argumentation is just completely wrong, you think that "significant usage" is some kind of "quality". You try to argue that a hammer and a screwdriver are of significant usage, when i fact the best tool for the job is a scalpel. FWI HN was not written in JavaScript or PHP but you can lookup that for yourself.
- tiew9Vii 5y ago
  > That's irrelevant - if you want uptake Haskell's slogan is "avoid success at all costs". Haskell isn't aiming for mass adoption. It wants to be a language for researching functional programming, it just so happens it's a useful language, and people write real software with it too. From https://haskell.foundation/whitepaper/ https://haskell.foundation/whitepaper/ > Haskell's slogan of "avoid success at all costs" was a clever and cheeky way of saying that innovation and research in programming languages, especially in functional programming, needed some insulation to succeed Nix doesn't have such a slogan as far as I know. It, however, started as a thesis to try and research and innovate new ideas. https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/phd-thesis.pdf https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/phd-thesis.pdf The Purely Functional Software Deployment Model. Twenty years later, it's been rather successful as a research project, one of the most active repos on GitHub. It has gained a lot of usage and support without trying to be successful, popular or market itself. The Nix language has helped it achieve what it set out to achieve. It's appealing to people who are interested in purely functional software. If that doesn't appeal to Javascript / PHP devs that's ok as it isn't trying to appeal to them. The Nix expression language is small and pretty simple; everything is an expression. The difficult bit is there are no javadoc/jsdoc/pydoc type docs beyond https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/expressions/builtins.html https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/expressions/builtins.htm... where you can go search easily. You have to go through the source code to find functions and see how they work. Also, you have to accept Nix is a ML style language, not a C style language. It's different to what you may know, but that isn't a fault of the language if someone only knows C style languages. The language is as it needed to be like that to achieve the design it wanted. Personally, I hate using Ansible firstly because of YAML. Secondly, Ansible is a task runner, often feeling like you are over abusing Ansible for things that are not a natural fit, and the debug headache dealing with determinism by convention only. I think it comes down to Nix isn't for you. That's ok.
  - lelanthran 5y ago
    > Haskell's slogan is "avoid success at all costs". Haskell isn't aiming for mass adoption. It wants to be a language for researching functional programming, it just so happens it's a useful language, and people write real software with it too. This isn't well-known - read through this thread - their are many people in this thread who deny that Haskell usage in industry is insignificantly small.
- ge96 5y ago
  Heh, there's a project I'm trying to get into and it's written in Haskell, I gotta learn it... if possible I'm probably going to port it to something else.

lelanthran 5y ago

> Because industry makes good decisions? That's irrelevant - if you want uptake, you need to support what user's want. It's been clear for at least a decade now that programmers don't want Haskell syntax. Whether it's a good syntax or not is irrelevant.

rowanG077 5y ago
Why do you think it's Haskells syntax that is the problem? The syntax is not so weird. I'd say the semantics are the hangup. 100% purity and lazy evaluation are a much harder pill to swallow then the syntax.
- lelanthran 5y ago
  > Why do you think it's Haskells syntax that is the problem? The syntax is not so weird. I'd say the semantics are the hangup. 100% purity and lazy evaluation are a much harder pill to swallow then the syntax. Could very well be - either way the language has been rejected. Boasting of Haskell characteristics[1] is, IMO, a great way to turn off prospective users. [1] I don't really know if the Nix project actually does blog posts and reachouts where they boast of Haskell-ish similarities.
  - rowanG077 5y ago
    I don't really see that industry has rejected Haskell at all. Haskell target simply wasn't (or isn't) industry. You can't really be rejected if you aren't trying to get into that niche. And Haskell has seen significant industrial use. So they succeeded at something they didn't even want to succeed at.
nix23 5y ago
>if you want uptake, you need to support what user's want Before the iPhone no one knew they wanted a good camera and "apps" on their phone. See the important point here -> "knew they wanted"
- lelanthran 5y ago
  > >if you want uptake, you need to support what user's want > Before the iPhone no one knew they wanted a good camera and "apps" on their phone. > See the important point here -> "knew they wanted" Haskell has been around now for something like 25 years. You'd have a point if the iPhone was unpopular for 25 years before users finally decided to like it. It wasn't. Users saw the iPhone and wanted it the minute they saw it. Programmers have been looking at Haskell for 25 years and rejecting it.
  - nix23 5y ago
    >Programmers have been looking at Haskell for 25 years and rejecting it. I really don't know why you think that true: https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell_in_industry https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell_in_industry And i really don't know why you speak for "programmers", just speak for yourself...maybe?
    - lelanthran 5y ago
      >> Programmers have been looking at Haskell for 25 years and rejecting it. > I really don't know why you think that true: Because it doesn't show up any any metric as having significant usage. A list of 100 companies using it doesn't make the hundreds of millions of other companies not using it go away.
      - nix23 5y ago
        Your argumentation is just completely wrong, you think that "significant usage" is some kind of "quality". You try to argue that a hammer and a screwdriver are of significant usage, when i fact the best tool for the job is a scalpel. FWI HN was not written in JavaScript or PHP but you can lookup that for yourself.
tiew9Vii 5y ago
> That's irrelevant - if you want uptake Haskell's slogan is "avoid success at all costs". Haskell isn't aiming for mass adoption. It wants to be a language for researching functional programming, it just so happens it's a useful language, and people write real software with it too. From https://haskell.foundation/whitepaper/ https://haskell.foundation/whitepaper/ > Haskell's slogan of "avoid success at all costs" was a clever and cheeky way of saying that innovation and research in programming languages, especially in functional programming, needed some insulation to succeed Nix doesn't have such a slogan as far as I know. It, however, started as a thesis to try and research and innovate new ideas. https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/phd-thesis.pdf https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/phd-thesis.pdf The Purely Functional Software Deployment Model. Twenty years later, it's been rather successful as a research project, one of the most active repos on GitHub. It has gained a lot of usage and support without trying to be successful, popular or market itself. The Nix language has helped it achieve what it set out to achieve. It's appealing to people who are interested in purely functional software. If that doesn't appeal to Javascript / PHP devs that's ok as it isn't trying to appeal to them. The Nix expression language is small and pretty simple; everything is an expression. The difficult bit is there are no javadoc/jsdoc/pydoc type docs beyond https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/expressions/builtins.html https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/expressions/builtins.htm... where you can go search easily. You have to go through the source code to find functions and see how they work. Also, you have to accept Nix is a ML style language, not a C style language. It's different to what you may know, but that isn't a fault of the language if someone only knows C style languages. The language is as it needed to be like that to achieve the design it wanted. Personally, I hate using Ansible firstly because of YAML. Secondly, Ansible is a task runner, often feeling like you are over abusing Ansible for things that are not a natural fit, and the debug headache dealing with determinism by convention only. I think it comes down to Nix isn't for you. That's ok.
- lelanthran 5y ago
  > Haskell's slogan is "avoid success at all costs". Haskell isn't aiming for mass adoption. It wants to be a language for researching functional programming, it just so happens it's a useful language, and people write real software with it too. This isn't well-known - read through this thread - their are many people in this thread who deny that Haskell usage in industry is insignificantly small.
ge96 5y ago
Heh, there's a project I'm trying to get into and it's written in Haskell, I gotta learn it... if possible I'm probably going to port it to something else.