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I don't think it's really possible to seriously consider Haskell as somehow less "dizzyingly complex" than rust unless you're already a math postgrad. I like ha

I don't think it's really possible to seriously consider Haskell as somehow less "dizzyingly complex" than rust unless you're already a math postgrad. I like haskell, don't get me wrong, but it is not in any way simple to write or read or work with by comparison. And while rust has some heady concepts in its design, for the most part even advanced users don't actually need to understand most of them to use it (I think this is actually rust's biggest innovation). I do wish rust had borrowed syntactically more from haskell than C++, though.

hither_shores 4y ago
> I don't think it's really possible to seriously consider Haskell as somehow less "dizzyingly complex" than rust unless you're already a math postgrad. This seems clearly false to me. Haskell has a higher abstraction ceiling than Rust, but unless you want to contribute to a particularly heavyweight library (`lens` comes to mind) you can get by just fine without going anywhere near it. In practice, most code in both languages maxes out at or below the mathematical sophistication of an introductory algebra class.
jerf 4y ago
Haskell is not really that complicated. What it is is capable of hosting dizzying complexity on top of its relatively simple core, which it is capable of hosting precisely because the core is so simple. It is similar to Lisp in that regard. There's also rather a lot of spazzing out because some very simple concepts like "monad" in Haskell somehow managed to pick up a lot of very bad explanations and an aura of mystique they don't deserve. They're really only complicated if you go in assuming they must be, and that if you have a simple understanding it must be wrong because it has to be complicated. Rust fans may be familiar with the process; I see the borrow checking starting to pick up a bit of a similar mystique with the greater community, though I don't think it'll ever quite reach the same level of fever pitch as "monad" has. And I think there's even a similar process; start with Rust, print out Hello World, then immediately try to jump to writing a custom network application in Tokio and, yeah, the borrow checker is going to look pretty complicated since you're basically trying to swallow it all in one shot. The solution is, don't do that. I detect some of that mystique in your post. It is a complete myth that you need to be a math postgrad to understand Haskell. It is a complete myth that you must understand group theory to use Haskell. It has even been observed that knowing too much Haskell can make group theory a bit harder to learn, and knowing too much group theory can make Haskell a bit harder to learn, because Haskell has a very programming-language centric view of group theory that means that even though some terminology is shared, everything is just a bit askew from the other. You no more need to be a math postgrad to use Haskell than you do to use a structured programming language, which also used to be a weird math nerd thing. Now it's just how programming languages work.
- deleted 4y ago
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hither_shores 4y ago

> I don't think it's really possible to seriously consider Haskell as somehow less "dizzyingly complex" than rust unless you're already a math postgrad. This seems clearly false to me. Haskell has a higher abstraction ceiling than Rust, but unless you want to contribute to a particularly heavyweight library (`lens` comes to mind) you can get by just fine without going anywhere near it. In practice, most code in both languages maxes out at or below the mathematical sophistication of an introductory algebra class.

jerf 4y ago

Haskell is not really that complicated. What it is is capable of hosting dizzying complexity on top of its relatively simple core, which it is capable of hosting precisely because the core is so simple. It is similar to Lisp in that regard. There's also rather a lot of spazzing out because some very simple concepts like "monad" in Haskell somehow managed to pick up a lot of very bad explanations and an aura of mystique they don't deserve. They're really only complicated if you go in assuming they must be, and that if you have a simple understanding it must be wrong because it has to be complicated. Rust fans may be familiar with the process; I see the borrow checking starting to pick up a bit of a similar mystique with the greater community, though I don't think it'll ever quite reach the same level of fever pitch as "monad" has. And I think there's even a similar process; start with Rust, print out Hello World, then immediately try to jump to writing a custom network application in Tokio and, yeah, the borrow checker is going to look pretty complicated since you're basically trying to swallow it all in one shot. The solution is, don't do that. I detect some of that mystique in your post. It is a complete myth that you need to be a math postgrad to understand Haskell. It is a complete myth that you must understand group theory to use Haskell. It has even been observed that knowing too much Haskell can make group theory a bit harder to learn, and knowing too much group theory can make Haskell a bit harder to learn, because Haskell has a very programming-language centric view of group theory that means that even though some terminology is shared, everything is just a bit askew from the other. You no more need to be a math postgrad to use Haskell than you do to use a structured programming language, which also used to be a weird math nerd thing. Now it's just how programming languages work.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]