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Running a Startup on Haskell
- antipax 15y agoHaskell web frameworks are maturing rapidly and the language is a joy to work in, once you learn how to approach problems in it. Haskell has probably not reached the peak of it's popularity yet (and frankly it's overdue for some mainstream love).
- viscanti 15y agoI think Haskell (and functional languages in general) will become increasingly popular as it is (they are) a powerful way to deal with concurrency and can easily take advantage of multiple processors. Languages are tools in a developers toolbox, and Haskell turns out to be a powerful one for several growing problems.
- danieldk 15y agoIt's not just that. Haskell has exceptionally strong typing and containment of mutable computations, making it much easier to write correct programs. When a module compiles, it's usually pretty bug-free.
- pbz 15y agoHow does the strong typing compare with Java/C#? Thanks.
- tikhonj 15y agoSeveral things jump out immediately: - Haskell has exceptionally thorough type inference (almost all type declarations are optional). - anything impure (e.g. involving an I/O) is typed as such - the types are easier to read and tend to give a good idea of what the function in question is doing - much more complicated types are readable - idioms like Monads lead to a lot of code that is much more abstract and generic than anything I've seen in Java. There are tons of library functions that can work on lists, or IO things, or parsers, or random values... Some things that I found particularly cool in Haskell: - functions (and even constants!) can be polymorphic on their return type. The function read, for example, always takes in a String but returns whatever type you happen to need. - You can easily express things like a "list of list": [[a]]. I don't even know how to begin writing a function like join in Java. (On lists, join takes a list of lists of something and flattens it.) Overall, I've found Haskell's type system to be much more useful, and much less of a burden, than Java's. That said, I'm just a college student with limited experience with either language. I've used Java more than Haskell but I've been using the latter more recently; I've never used C#.
- skybrian 15y agoMaybe it's better with more experience or when you're reading your own code, but I find that reading a Haskell program is often like reading a math paper - you can't skim it; you have to slow way down and study it, one line at a time, and look up the definition of each term as you go and think about what it means, and try out simple examples. And sometimes you don't have the background to understand the underlying concepts, so you have to study a prerequisite first. So I think to like Haskell, you have to truly believe that more abstraction is better. It's very much a mathematician's language. The thing is, when writing code, I don't want to write a math paper. When I'm done, I want it to be as smooth and easy to read and as obvious as an article in the New Yorker.
- jerf 15y ago"When I'm done, I want it to be as smooth and easy to read and as obvious as an article in the New Yorker." Your metaphor is apt; if your code is going to be that smooth, you need to learn Haskell to the same extent you know English for the New Yorker. The Internet suggests that the New Yorker is written for a "10th grade reading level", but of course the average American has between an 8th or 9th grade level. It does get easier with practice to read the language, and what's left after that is whatever core difficult the code being expressed has regardless of the target language, the essential difficulty. Haskell can hardly be blamed for bringing that to the foreground where other languages stuff it in the background.
- skybrian 15y agoIf I learn Haskell well and start writing code that's idiomatic for that audience, I'm limiting my audience to the few people who also know Haskell (and the particular Haskell idioms I'm using). It's like writing in Esperanto instead of English. My ideal is more along the lines of the Python examples that Peter Norvig writes, which can be understood by pretty much any programmer, even if they're not all that fluent in Python.
- nightski 15y agoIt has nothing to do with being a mathematician. There are common patterns as any language. Those patterns often end up as higher order functions. But at some point, it becomes very natural to read.
- chancho 15y agoSpace leaks, stack overflows (foldl vs. foldl'), failed pattern matches (head []), etc. There are tons of bugs lurking in well-formed Haskell programs.
- nightski 15y agoTons being a vast overstatement. I mean, you could exploit these things to cause bugs, but really do you encounter them on a day to day basis? I know I rarely if ever have.
- dustingetz 15y agoanyone watch this yet? worth the 50 minutes? is there a transcript?
- rednaught 15y agoIf you're interested in Haskell then yes it is a good presentation. In my opinion, Bryan is one of the more thoughtful speakers around. Slides are here: http://bos.github.com/strange-loop-2011/talk/talk.html#%281%29 http://bos.github.com/strange-loop-2011/talk/talk.html#%281%... Navigation uses keyboard arrows. He had a similar/same talk about a month prior and here is the video on Vimeo if you're not a fan of InfoQ's format: http://vimeo.com/27192476 http://vimeo.com/27192476 (Bryan O'Sullivan - Building Solid Distributed Applications with Haskell and Riak)
- Unboxed 15y agoAbsolutely!
- looser 15y agoI only read the slides, but at one point the author mentions that they've built an hybrid app using (Haskell + C#). Next, the author mentions about several limitations that C# has and that Haskell has a much better approach. So, why use C#? Why not only use Haskell?
- taudelta 15y agoHe mentions that later on during the Q&A session
- Unboxed 15y agoTerrific video! Thank you very much for posting! UP!
- jsdalton 15y agoDoes Haskell offer any tangible, practical advantages or benefits over other languages in the context of a web framework, aside from just "if you prefer a functional style of programming and you're working on a web project, here's a way to do it"? I'd love for somebody to convince me why a Haskell approach to web frameworks is superior to Python/PHP/Ruby/JS beyond the usual "it's a matter of taste" argument.
- jamwt 15y agoHaskell's advantages (and disadvantages) as a Web Framework are generally the same as in any other application domain: performance, concurrency, and correctness.
- zura 15y agoWhile I agree regarding correctness and concurrency, I wouldn't emphasize performance, even for Java and .NET, whose GCs are more developed, tuned and tested in the production environment than Haskell's one. Edit: And for Haskell, achieving needed performance can be quite tricky with regard to its laziness.
- jamesbritt 15y agoThere was some discussion on HN about the Snap Web framework benchmarks relative to some other frameworks: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1380405 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1380405 No .Net in there, though.
- danieldk 15y agoEdit: And for Haskell, achieving needed performance can be quite tricky with regard to its laziness. But Snap is driven by enumerators/iteratees (via the enumerator package), which make it much easier to do fast near-constant space IO. I have built a web application that uses Snap to query large (parse) treebanks, and it was easy to make it performant.
- supersillyus 15y agoFor one, GHC gives you M:N threads with the runtime handling the async IO under the hood, making it possible to write code in a simple blocking style while still getting use of all your cores and having fast IO. This is also true for Erlang, Go, and a few others, though, and it's not terribly relevant for lots of simple web code, but it is a practical advantage.
- JoshTriplett 15y agoFor anyone who'd prefer a direct video link rather than the infoq flash player: http://d1snlc0orfrhj.cloudfront.net/presentations/11-sep-runningastartuponhaskell.mp4 http://d1snlc0orfrhj.cloudfront.net/presentations/11-sep-run... (Retrieved by setting my User-Agent to that of an iPad, which causes infoq to serve up a <video> tag.)
- jamesbritt 15y agoThanks for the link, and for the hack. That's quite handy.
- crasshopper 15y agoSo no-one has built a QuickCheck for Ruby or Python? I'd like to use this "property-based testing" he stressed.
- fl3x 15y agoThere are plenty of implementations linked from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickCheck http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickCheck. (I'm not sure in what state they are though.)