3 ms·

I hate to ad hominem, but this guy is a known troll of the Haskell community. (I don't know the back story but I believe it's related to him running an OCaml c

by evmar 14y ago

I hate to ad hominem, but this guy is a known troll of the Haskell community. (I don't know the back story but I believe it's related to him running an OCaml consultancy; many former OCaml fans, myself included, discovered Haskell as "that language that's like OCaml but better".) Rather than downvote his posts or comments to oblivion, I recommend reading it all with a lot of skepticism. For one example, he claims it takes two days to install the Haskell compiler. I can refute that from personal experience, or you could just consider that it's really implausible anyone would ever try out such a language. (And then visit their downloads page and see it's the same as Ruby or whatever: apt-get install or download an installer and run it: http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/ http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/ ) Edit: the post is from 2010. Present tense in the above is all wrong.

cantankerous 14y ago
I'd like to throw in there that, even in 2010, it took me all of 20 minutes to get GHC going on a fresh machine. Perhaps he's using hyperbole?
fooooobar 14y ago
What makes Haskell better than OCaml in your experience? I haven't heard of much real world evidence of Haskell being better, just people saying things like it must be better because of its monads.
moldbug 14y ago
The OP is clearly a troll. The question remains interesting, though. My theory is that Haskell has a lot of usability problems. A programming language is a UI for programmers. Usability issues are always a sufficient explanation for market disappointments in any product or field. Most notably, Haskell is rooted in a theoretical foundation that's essentially a major subfield of 20th-century mathematics, using concepts and notations which most programmers (a) do not understand, (b) do not want to understand, (c) do not need to understand, and (d) in many cases are not physically capable of understanding (eg, they have IQs < 140, or other sorts of subtle congenital damage to the math lobes). As "LYAH" demonstrates, it's possible to teach programmers (or at least a certain subset thereof) to use Haskell without fully understanding it. But this approach has serious UI problems of its own. It's not very comfortable to use a platform whose semantics you don't understand. There's no comparable hidden complexity in Ruby, Python, Perl, JS, etc. Laziness is also a significant UI problem, inasmuch as it becomes cognitively very difficult to understand and/or control the performance of your program. Typically in UI, when you find one UI disaster you find more - it shows that usability was not a principal goal of the project. One of the difficulties in diagnosing usability problems of this type is that people rarely complain about them directly, because their complaint would typically be of the form "Haskell made me feel stupid." My guess is that for everyone who's succeeded in learning them a Haskell, there are four or five who tried it and came away feeling stupid. Not a very pleasant sensation.
gphil 14y ago
I remember this post from a couple of years ago. I also remember thinking that it reflected more poorly on this guy than it did Haskell, and I think it still does today. Additionally, one of the more important criticisms that I actually shared with the OP is that it took me a few evenings to get up and running with Haskell around 2008-2009 on Mac OS X. However that problem has been just about completely solved by the Haskell platform (http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/ http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/) these days. Also, recent activity in the Snap and Yesod web frameworks makes me more optimistic for Haskell adoption in industry, although it still has to clear a lot of adoption hurdles before it becomes more common.
batista 14y ago
>I hate to ad hominem, but this guy is a known troll of the Haskell community. I could not care less. The post is well-written, and makes a case. You can criticize his case, or even the facts he mentions or you could ignore them, but calling him a troll is totally unproductive (essentially it means: "his arguments are BS because he is a bad person, but I won't say what's specifically bad about them"). I also find that (to keep with Sturgeon's Law perhaps) 90% of uses of the accusation "troll" are misuses, mostly translating too "the guy makes arguments we don't like, and he won't go away". Also, to everyone: he doesn't say that installing Haskell takes too days. He says it took 2 days to HIM --and AT THE TIME. Perhaps he wasn't using the all-too-might distribution you are using where it's one apt-get away...

by evmar 14y ago

cantankerous 14y ago

I'd like to throw in there that, even in 2010, it took me all of 20 minutes to get GHC going on a fresh machine. Perhaps he's using hyperbole?

fooooobar 14y ago

What makes Haskell better than OCaml in your experience? I haven't heard of much real world evidence of Haskell being better, just people saying things like it must be better because of its monads.

moldbug 14y ago

The OP is clearly a troll. The question remains interesting, though. My theory is that Haskell has a lot of usability problems. A programming language is a UI for programmers. Usability issues are always a sufficient explanation for market disappointments in any product or field. Most notably, Haskell is rooted in a theoretical foundation that's essentially a major subfield of 20th-century mathematics, using concepts and notations which most programmers (a) do not understand, (b) do not want to understand, (c) do not need to understand, and (d) in many cases are not physically capable of understanding (eg, they have IQs < 140, or other sorts of subtle congenital damage to the math lobes). As "LYAH" demonstrates, it's possible to teach programmers (or at least a certain subset thereof) to use Haskell without fully understanding it. But this approach has serious UI problems of its own. It's not very comfortable to use a platform whose semantics you don't understand. There's no comparable hidden complexity in Ruby, Python, Perl, JS, etc. Laziness is also a significant UI problem, inasmuch as it becomes cognitively very difficult to understand and/or control the performance of your program. Typically in UI, when you find one UI disaster you find more - it shows that usability was not a principal goal of the project. One of the difficulties in diagnosing usability problems of this type is that people rarely complain about them directly, because their complaint would typically be of the form "Haskell made me feel stupid." My guess is that for everyone who's succeeded in learning them a Haskell, there are four or five who tried it and came away feeling stupid. Not a very pleasant sensation.

gphil 14y ago

I remember this post from a couple of years ago. I also remember thinking that it reflected more poorly on this guy than it did Haskell, and I think it still does today. Additionally, one of the more important criticisms that I actually shared with the OP is that it took me a few evenings to get up and running with Haskell around 2008-2009 on Mac OS X. However that problem has been just about completely solved by the Haskell platform (http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/ http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/) these days. Also, recent activity in the Snap and Yesod web frameworks makes me more optimistic for Haskell adoption in industry, although it still has to clear a lot of adoption hurdles before it becomes more common.

batista 14y ago

>I hate to ad hominem, but this guy is a known troll of the Haskell community. I could not care less. The post is well-written, and makes a case. You can criticize his case, or even the facts he mentions or you could ignore them, but calling him a troll is totally unproductive (essentially it means: "his arguments are BS because he is a bad person, but I won't say what's specifically bad about them"). I also find that (to keep with Sturgeon's Law perhaps) 90% of uses of the accusation "troll" are misuses, mostly translating too "the guy makes arguments we don't like, and he won't go away". Also, to everyone: he doesn't say that installing Haskell takes too days. He says it took 2 days to HIM --and AT THE TIME. Perhaps he wasn't using the all-too-might distribution you are using where it's one apt-get away...