5 ms·

2022 State of Haskell Survey

48 points by luispauloml 4y ago

weatherlight 4y ago
I hope tooling becomes the #1 priority. - after using languages like Rust and Elixir, It's hard going back to other langs where the tooling is not at that standard,
- tuukkah 4y ago
  In your opinion, where are the biggest differences between Rust and Haskell tooling quality?
  - jfoutz 4y ago
    not the op. I'm a hobbyist. I've figured out stack and it's pretty great. My editing cycle is pretty terrible. usually vim in one terminal and another terminal to run ghci or stack build. That's ok, it lets me work through my toy problems. But compared to IntelliJ or even coq and proof-general, it's a lot rougher to loop through type in new code, run it, fix or next batch of new code. obviously developers are going to use whatever they want, but it would be really nice to see a setup with _anything_ emacs, visual studio, atom whatever. and show how to get to that setup, and how to quickly test, analyze performance, refactor. Refactoring is Haskell's super-power. I change things and chase compiler errors, and it works well enough. Compared to even java/eclipse 15 years ago it feels primitive. it works, I can get by. I'd like to see how "grown ups" do it.
    - tikhonj 4y ago
      Have you tried the Haskell language server? I don't think it has project-wide automatic refactoring—maybe that's something people are working on, but also seems quite difficult—but it definitely tightens the write/compile/fix loop.
      - jfoutz 4y ago
        I think I did, I think I spent some time puttering around trying to get a setup to match my config. I would suggest, a clear path in a getting started guide - if you use this editor and these tools, you will have a working system end to end. maybe a short video showing interaction with that specific toolset. I got sort of mired in what packages to use for emacs. I don't really know how other people have their stuff set up. Not having a clear path, I just kinda winged it. And was not successful. I understand all the parts of my current workflow. There's nothing wrong with presenting 500 options for solutions. But it would be really nice to have a "do these 5 things and you're good to go". Any set of tools would be fine. I can compare a working system to my system and puzzle out what I need to configure. That may already exist, and I missed it. If that's the case, make that guide more prominent. I seem to recall looking around a lot.
        tikhonj 4y ago
        Yeah, definitely. We're working on adding a guide[1] like that to haskell.org as we speak :) If you have a chance, you could look over the PR and tell me whether this is roughly what you're thinking of. [1]: https://github.com/haskell-infra/www.haskell.org/pull/214 https://github.com/haskell-infra/www.haskell.org/pull/214
        jfoutz 4y ago
        ### Editor *Visual Studio Code* is a popular choice with well supported editor integration. Install the [Haskell extension](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=haskell.haskell https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=haskell....) and you are all set. It should work out of the box and use your installation of HLS. lgtm
  - weatherlight 4y ago
    For one, cargo just works. The same with hex and mix. https://github.com/hexpm https://github.com/hexpm I'm using a mac m1 I cannot get stack and the Haskell language server to play nice for VSCode. I'm also not a huge fan of YAML in general for configuration. Rust uses Toml, Elixir literally just uses elixir itself for configuration.
cfiggers 4y ago
Haskell is a beautiful, elegant language. And the tooling is a trainwreck that keeps me from using it.
- whateveracct 4y ago
  Different strokes. I literally use ghci + plain text editor and are in no way tooling bound no matter the project scale. I'd say 25% of my Haskelling happens at a computer though.
  - nequo 4y ago
    > I'd say 25% of my Haskelling happens at a computer though. Where do you do the rest of your Haskelling?
    - whateveracct 4y ago
      Doing chores, playing music, playing video games, laying about, walking. I also tend to browse random Haddocks and source code on my phone the same way I browse other websites. It's mostly a subconscious thing. I can't tell you how many times I've had a Haskell problem to solve (highly-abstract and systems programming alike) and I take a couple days off the keyboard and come back and write code that'll last years. Of course, there's still a time and place to do the whole tight feedback coding loop thing. But it isn't how most of my Haskell comes to be.
      - belmont_sup 4y ago
        I didn’t understand where you were going the first sentence but then paragraphs 2 and onwards were fun. Are you usually thinking in terms of type abstractions and enforcing invariants through types?
        whateveracct 4y ago
        Yeah, I'm a very type-driven dev. So sometimes I'll get stuck with my types and not know a way forward. Usually the answer pops in my head out of nowhere. Reminds me of when Nietzsche said ideas were out in the world, waiting to be bumped into on a walk. Sometimes it's more that I have a tedious problem and think surely there's a better formulation. That also is a good thing to grind in the subconscious. There are still some problems for some project I haven't solved too! It'll come.
carterschonwald 4y ago
There’s a bunch of issues with how these surveys have been designed in the past, imo, and generally solicitating easily interpretable qualitative responses on technical systems is just hard.
doe88 4y ago
I'm a relatively newcomer so maybe discard this comment. What hurts me most at this point is the lack of documentation, or at least the lack of simple examples. This is the only language I know where more often than not the main documentation of a module is a link to a journal paper. Alternatively, I'm just not always able to infer what a function does just by looking at its signature. Just give examples.
- tome 4y ago
  Can you please report concrete examples here: https://github.com/tomjaguarpaw/tilapia/issues/new https://github.com/tomjaguarpaw/tilapia/issues/new I'll do what I can to improve the situation, but I need to know which packages precisely you are talking about.
gamegoblin 4y ago
This is maybe a big ask, but could anyone who has been a long time Haskell user give some bullet points on major language developments since ~2015 or so? I was deep into Haskell and used it as my primary language from 2012-2015, but switched over to Rust around that point. I've been thinking about trying a mid-size hobby project in Haskell to get updated on the new state of the art. Some things I have heard tangentially (and may be misremembering): - Field accessors (i.e. `myObject.field` instead of `field myObject`) - Monad hierarchy refactoring (monad of no return) - LiquidHaskell making some inroads How is package management these days? Is cabal hell still a thing? How's the IDE situation?
- tikhonj 4y ago
  Cabal's been fundamentally redesigned to have "Nix-style" builds. This has solved most of the problems I remember encountering with the tool. These days, I only have issues when packages have incorrect or incompatible version bounds on dependencies. Tooling has improved massively in general. ghcup can install and manage versions of Cabal/Stack/GHC/etc automatically. The Haskell language server provides reasonable editor-agnostic IDE functionality; I've been using it for a while now and have found it to be useful and solid. The language itself has had a bunch of small quality-of-life improvements. The foundation still feels the same—not a major change like jumping to dependent types or something—but lots of rough edges have been sanded off. I've been using Haskell for over a decade now and I'm very happy with the progress of the language and the ecosystem over the last several years.
- rkrzr 4y ago
  > How is package management these days? We use Stack together with Nix to pin all dependencies. That works very well. > Is cabal hell still a thing? No. > How's the IDE situation? Much better than it was. Haskell Language Server (HLS) has been a game changer. It works very well and can be used with different editors (easy to install for VS Code for example).
  - declnz 4y ago
    > We use Stack together with Nix to pin all dependencies. That works very well. Could you elaborate on the path you took here? Sounds interesting
nawgz 4y ago
As a non-Haskeller, the only tool I can think of interacting with that has any Haskell is Hasura's graphql-engine[0], which GitHub stats say is 28% Haskell (and then like 55% web languages, so I assume the backend is all Haskell and the web languages are for the UI it presents etc) Are there other popular Haskell tools? Or is it more of an academic language? I was surprised to see it on the GitHub repo. [0]: https://github.com/hasura/graphql-engine https://github.com/hasura/graphql-engine
- luispauloml 4y ago
  Thinking about "tools" in a more general sense, I'd mention Pandoc,¹ which is an end-user application, and PureScirpt,² a programming language. ¹ https://pandoc.org https://pandoc.org ² https://www.purescript.org https://www.purescript.org
- adius 4y ago
  There are lots of popular, mature, and awesome Haskell projects: https://github.com/search?q=language%3Ahaskell+stars%3A%3E1000 https://github.com/search?q=language%3Ahaskell+stars%3A%3E10... GitHub uses Haskell for all its code analyzation, so you're interacting with it all the time! => https://github.com/github/semantic https://github.com/github/semantic
luispauloml 4y ago
I really wish I could use Haskell all the time instead of Python and the most dreaded programming language, a.k.a. MATLAB.¹ I guess all that's left for me is to do whatever toy projects come to my mind in my free time. ¹ https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted-language-love-dread https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#most-loved-dreaded-and...
tomas789 4y ago
I have tried to push for a Haskell in my previous job. We had a task that was especially well suited for that. It was a large collection of mostly declarative computations for the mixed-integer optimization. I also wanted to take an advantage of Liquid Haskell since that would allow us to move a few checks from runtime to compile time. That would be a game changer. Things like divide by zero were very common. It is easy to detect division by zero but not so easy to cover all the edge cases that could cause it. At the end of the day we did not go forward with that. The reasons mostly were: 1. Even though I used a lot of my "social credit" on this everybody was scared of it. Mostly because of the vibe that comes with Haskell. 2. Purely functional languages come with lots of concepts that are unfamiliar to most programmers (everybody in my team was well equipped with CS degree and theoretical knowledge but still those concepts were new-ish). 3. The higher in company hierarchy the more people were scared (this was a critical project for the whole company of ~22k people). 4. We couldn't figure out debugging. Our codebase was ~40k generated lines of code (type definitions, basic accessor functions and so on) plus ~10k LoC we would write on top of that. The only VSCode-based debugging I was able to figure out was basically loading it in GHCi and then doing the debugging which was fine. The problem was the load itself. It took ages because it recompiled majority of the codebase on load. No precompiled parts were used. Result was that every debugging session took minutes to start up. On the other hand Liquid Haskell has a great potential and I hope that there is a future in which we have similar tools in more common languages. As the complexity of the codebase grows it become more important to have a tool to provide additional guarantees. We did not have much of the code on its own but it was packed with complexity and dependencies. Liquid Haskell seemed to provide a tool that does not get into your way when you don't need it but it available when you want it.

48 points by luispauloml 4y ago

I hope tooling becomes the #1 priority. - after using languages like Rust and Elixir, It's hard going back to other langs where the tooling is not at that standard,

tuukkah 4y ago
In your opinion, where are the biggest differences between Rust and Haskell tooling quality?
- jfoutz 4y ago
  not the op. I'm a hobbyist. I've figured out stack and it's pretty great. My editing cycle is pretty terrible. usually vim in one terminal and another terminal to run ghci or stack build. That's ok, it lets me work through my toy problems. But compared to IntelliJ or even coq and proof-general, it's a lot rougher to loop through type in new code, run it, fix or next batch of new code. obviously developers are going to use whatever they want, but it would be really nice to see a setup with _anything_ emacs, visual studio, atom whatever. and show how to get to that setup, and how to quickly test, analyze performance, refactor. Refactoring is Haskell's super-power. I change things and chase compiler errors, and it works well enough. Compared to even java/eclipse 15 years ago it feels primitive. it works, I can get by. I'd like to see how "grown ups" do it.
  - tikhonj 4y ago
    Have you tried the Haskell language server? I don't think it has project-wide automatic refactoring—maybe that's something people are working on, but also seems quite difficult—but it definitely tightens the write/compile/fix loop.
    - jfoutz 4y ago
      I think I did, I think I spent some time puttering around trying to get a setup to match my config. I would suggest, a clear path in a getting started guide - if you use this editor and these tools, you will have a working system end to end. maybe a short video showing interaction with that specific toolset. I got sort of mired in what packages to use for emacs. I don't really know how other people have their stuff set up. Not having a clear path, I just kinda winged it. And was not successful. I understand all the parts of my current workflow. There's nothing wrong with presenting 500 options for solutions. But it would be really nice to have a "do these 5 things and you're good to go". Any set of tools would be fine. I can compare a working system to my system and puzzle out what I need to configure. That may already exist, and I missed it. If that's the case, make that guide more prominent. I seem to recall looking around a lot.
      - tikhonj 4y ago
        Yeah, definitely. We're working on adding a guide[1] like that to haskell.org as we speak :) If you have a chance, you could look over the PR and tell me whether this is roughly what you're thinking of. [1]: https://github.com/haskell-infra/www.haskell.org/pull/214 https://github.com/haskell-infra/www.haskell.org/pull/214
        jfoutz 4y ago
        ### Editor *Visual Studio Code* is a popular choice with well supported editor integration. Install the [Haskell extension](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=haskell.haskell https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=haskell....) and you are all set. It should work out of the box and use your installation of HLS. lgtm
- weatherlight 4y ago
  For one, cargo just works. The same with hex and mix. https://github.com/hexpm https://github.com/hexpm I'm using a mac m1 I cannot get stack and the Haskell language server to play nice for VSCode. I'm also not a huge fan of YAML in general for configuration. Rust uses Toml, Elixir literally just uses elixir itself for configuration.

cfiggers 4y ago

Haskell is a beautiful, elegant language. And the tooling is a trainwreck that keeps me from using it.

whateveracct 4y ago
Different strokes. I literally use ghci + plain text editor and are in no way tooling bound no matter the project scale. I'd say 25% of my Haskelling happens at a computer though.
- nequo 4y ago
  > I'd say 25% of my Haskelling happens at a computer though. Where do you do the rest of your Haskelling?
  - whateveracct 4y ago
    Doing chores, playing music, playing video games, laying about, walking. I also tend to browse random Haddocks and source code on my phone the same way I browse other websites. It's mostly a subconscious thing. I can't tell you how many times I've had a Haskell problem to solve (highly-abstract and systems programming alike) and I take a couple days off the keyboard and come back and write code that'll last years. Of course, there's still a time and place to do the whole tight feedback coding loop thing. But it isn't how most of my Haskell comes to be.
    - belmont_sup 4y ago
      I didn’t understand where you were going the first sentence but then paragraphs 2 and onwards were fun. Are you usually thinking in terms of type abstractions and enforcing invariants through types?
      - whateveracct 4y ago
        Yeah, I'm a very type-driven dev. So sometimes I'll get stuck with my types and not know a way forward. Usually the answer pops in my head out of nowhere. Reminds me of when Nietzsche said ideas were out in the world, waiting to be bumped into on a walk. Sometimes it's more that I have a tedious problem and think surely there's a better formulation. That also is a good thing to grind in the subconscious. There are still some problems for some project I haven't solved too! It'll come.

carterschonwald 4y ago

There’s a bunch of issues with how these surveys have been designed in the past, imo, and generally solicitating easily interpretable qualitative responses on technical systems is just hard.

doe88 4y ago

I'm a relatively newcomer so maybe discard this comment. What hurts me most at this point is the lack of documentation, or at least the lack of simple examples. This is the only language I know where more often than not the main documentation of a module is a link to a journal paper. Alternatively, I'm just not always able to infer what a function does just by looking at its signature. Just give examples.

tome 4y ago
Can you please report concrete examples here: https://github.com/tomjaguarpaw/tilapia/issues/new https://github.com/tomjaguarpaw/tilapia/issues/new I'll do what I can to improve the situation, but I need to know which packages precisely you are talking about.

gamegoblin 4y ago

This is maybe a big ask, but could anyone who has been a long time Haskell user give some bullet points on major language developments since ~2015 or so? I was deep into Haskell and used it as my primary language from 2012-2015, but switched over to Rust around that point. I've been thinking about trying a mid-size hobby project in Haskell to get updated on the new state of the art. Some things I have heard tangentially (and may be misremembering): - Field accessors (i.e. `myObject.field` instead of `field myObject`) - Monad hierarchy refactoring (monad of no return) - LiquidHaskell making some inroads How is package management these days? Is cabal hell still a thing? How's the IDE situation?

tikhonj 4y ago
Cabal's been fundamentally redesigned to have "Nix-style" builds. This has solved most of the problems I remember encountering with the tool. These days, I only have issues when packages have incorrect or incompatible version bounds on dependencies. Tooling has improved massively in general. ghcup can install and manage versions of Cabal/Stack/GHC/etc automatically. The Haskell language server provides reasonable editor-agnostic IDE functionality; I've been using it for a while now and have found it to be useful and solid. The language itself has had a bunch of small quality-of-life improvements. The foundation still feels the same—not a major change like jumping to dependent types or something—but lots of rough edges have been sanded off. I've been using Haskell for over a decade now and I'm very happy with the progress of the language and the ecosystem over the last several years.
rkrzr 4y ago
> How is package management these days? We use Stack together with Nix to pin all dependencies. That works very well. > Is cabal hell still a thing? No. > How's the IDE situation? Much better than it was. Haskell Language Server (HLS) has been a game changer. It works very well and can be used with different editors (easy to install for VS Code for example).
- declnz 4y ago
  > We use Stack together with Nix to pin all dependencies. That works very well. Could you elaborate on the path you took here? Sounds interesting

nawgz 4y ago

As a non-Haskeller, the only tool I can think of interacting with that has any Haskell is Hasura's graphql-engine[0], which GitHub stats say is 28% Haskell (and then like 55% web languages, so I assume the backend is all Haskell and the web languages are for the UI it presents etc) Are there other popular Haskell tools? Or is it more of an academic language? I was surprised to see it on the GitHub repo. [0]: https://github.com/hasura/graphql-engine https://github.com/hasura/graphql-engine

luispauloml 4y ago
Thinking about "tools" in a more general sense, I'd mention Pandoc,¹ which is an end-user application, and PureScirpt,² a programming language. ¹ https://pandoc.org https://pandoc.org ² https://www.purescript.org https://www.purescript.org
adius 4y ago
There are lots of popular, mature, and awesome Haskell projects: https://github.com/search?q=language%3Ahaskell+stars%3A%3E1000 https://github.com/search?q=language%3Ahaskell+stars%3A%3E10... GitHub uses Haskell for all its code analyzation, so you're interacting with it all the time! => https://github.com/github/semantic https://github.com/github/semantic

luispauloml 4y ago

I really wish I could use Haskell all the time instead of Python and the most dreaded programming language, a.k.a. MATLAB.¹ I guess all that's left for me is to do whatever toy projects come to my mind in my free time. ¹ https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted-language-love-dread https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#most-loved-dreaded-and...

tomas789 4y ago

I have tried to push for a Haskell in my previous job. We had a task that was especially well suited for that. It was a large collection of mostly declarative computations for the mixed-integer optimization. I also wanted to take an advantage of Liquid Haskell since that would allow us to move a few checks from runtime to compile time. That would be a game changer. Things like divide by zero were very common. It is easy to detect division by zero but not so easy to cover all the edge cases that could cause it. At the end of the day we did not go forward with that. The reasons mostly were: 1. Even though I used a lot of my "social credit" on this everybody was scared of it. Mostly because of the vibe that comes with Haskell. 2. Purely functional languages come with lots of concepts that are unfamiliar to most programmers (everybody in my team was well equipped with CS degree and theoretical knowledge but still those concepts were new-ish). 3. The higher in company hierarchy the more people were scared (this was a critical project for the whole company of ~22k people). 4. We couldn't figure out debugging. Our codebase was ~40k generated lines of code (type definitions, basic accessor functions and so on) plus ~10k LoC we would write on top of that. The only VSCode-based debugging I was able to figure out was basically loading it in GHCi and then doing the debugging which was fine. The problem was the load itself. It took ages because it recompiled majority of the codebase on load. No precompiled parts were used. Result was that every debugging session took minutes to start up. On the other hand Liquid Haskell has a great potential and I hope that there is a future in which we have similar tools in more common languages. As the complexity of the codebase grows it become more important to have a tool to provide additional guarantees. We did not have much of the code on its own but it was packed with complexity and dependencies. Liquid Haskell seemed to provide a tool that does not get into your way when you don't need it but it available when you want it.