5 ms·

Why is Haskell used so little in the industry?

43 points by Cieplak 14y ago

ajross 14y ago
Tough love: because Haskell proponents spend all their time ruminating on the beauty and purity of their preferred language instead of writing useful and novel software. No one whines about why, say, coffeescript is used so little in the industry. They just go out and use it. (Edit: to be clear, I'm not comparing coffeescript and Haskell as languages. I'm comparing the cultures around them. One "team" has a new toy and is excitedly building stuff with it; there's now a whole community of great stuff available with real applications. The other... has some interesting tools available if you look, but no energy. And they spend their time wondering why and NOT excitedly building stuff.)
- true_religion 14y ago
  Kind of an unfair comparision... Coffeescript compiles to Javascript. Sure, GHC Haskell might have once compiled to C but no one was expected to actually read the C code. Reading the Javascript code is pretty much unavoidable with Coffeescript because debugging utilities don't exist for it at all.
  - pufuwozu 14y ago
    I know quite a few people that use Scala in place of Haskell just because it runs on the JVM. Interoperability matters.
  - Groxx 14y ago
    So it's an unfair comparison in favor of Coffeescript because Coffeescript has inadequate tools? I don't see the rationale here. Especially since the vast majority of javascript out there is minified, especially when it has been generated by something like Coffeescript. Nobody is expected to actually read the minified code.
- pufuwozu 14y ago
  I write useful and novel software. I'm doing that right now in Haskell. It's also deployed to Heroku. You wouldn't know it's written in Haskell if I didn't tell you. Saying that X (CoffeeScript) proponents make more useful/novel software than Y (Haskell) proponents is pretty crazy.
  - ajross 14y ago
    I said no such thing. I said coffeescript proponents don't whine about it. There's a culture in mainstream open source about "getting things done". People make stuff and show it off, and the value is what they made, not how they did it. Haskell lacks that culture, as evidenced by the premise behind this question.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - jamesbritt 14y ago
      Haskell may lack the promotional aspect. I'm a casual Haskell enthusiast and have no trouble finding interesting useful Haskell apps. But that may be because I now know where to look. Or have taken the time to find things. So Haskell has a culture of making things but may lack the "show it off" part.
- mquander 14y ago
  Should I be reading something out of this comment other than a totally ridiculous insult? I would flag it and move on if it wasn't coming from someone whose contributions I normally enjoy. - You seem to be saying that Haskell people are per capita less productive (or more "whiny?") than people writing in other languages. I have no idea why you think this is true, because I don't know any good way to even find out how many people know Haskell. Please show even the slightest bit of evidence. - Are you kidding me? Go Google "coffeescript usage" (better yet: "why coffeescript") and see page after page of people writing why they're using Coffeescript, why they're not using Coffeescript, asking if anyone else is using Coffeescript, telling people to use Coffeescript, ad infinitum. People like to talk about who is using every single piece of technology on this planet.
  - Drbble 14y ago
    Not less per capita, but far far less capita.
  - ajross 14y ago
    The meaning of "tough love" is that I'm trying to provide some needed advice, which I recognize in advance may be misinterpreted as an insult. I meant it sincerely. I don't care whether or not people "talk about" Haskell, that's not my point at all. People will start using it (which is the answer to the linked question) when Haskell starts doing things that are better than what is available elsewhere. It isn't. If it's a better environment for doing, say, MVC web frameworks then make something that competes with rails. If it's faster than C (I hear this a lot), then write some system middleware that clearly improves on the existing stuff. And stop asking why people aren't using it!
jonathansizz 14y ago
Answer: it should be clear by now that the mainstream has decided that any viable language must have an Algol-like structure. It's as simple as that; that's what industry languages look like. They are familiar, comfortable and just have an 'industrial' feel to them.
- eli_gottlieb 14y ago
  There are several other issues than just that. Haskell's bondage-and-discipline insistence on functional purity makes it very difficult to mix multiple kinds of effects. If you only use one kind of effect, There's a Monad for That (and you probably don't even have to understand monads!), but once you want to use multiple kinds, you suddenly need to really understand monad machinery (transformers, combinators, etc.). And if you're avoiding monads and comonads, you have to use entirely separate purely-functional data structures. In addition, Haskell's strong emphasis on statically-determined behavior over run-time decision making creates a language prone to unextensible software. It's not that functional programming and static typing are not useful; it's that industrial programming can take much better of object-oriented and dynamic features, specifically the modularity and extensibility of classes and virtual methods, than of functional and static features. Haskell is suitable for code that you write once, perfectly, but industry needs a language for software you write again and again, never quite right but good enough to ship.
  - philwelch 14y ago
    It turns out that purely functional data structures are useful anyway as a solution to concurrency, though.
    - Drbble 14y ago
      Immutable structures, yes. And you can get those without Haskell's other baggage. Haskell is great for research in persistent data structures because it is impossible to cheat. But then it is more industry-practical to port the algorithms than write an application in Haskell. check out Google's MapReduce and Flume papers, for example.
adam-f 14y ago
My experience with it has been mostly fighting with enabling various language extensions to get some (real) sample programs working. The algol languages are much easier to debug compile issues, Haskell's purity makes certain issues non-obvious and complicated. Also, I think Stevey satirized the situation quite nicely. http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/12/haskell-researchers-announce-discovery.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/12/haskell-researchers-...
maeon3 14y ago
The internet is an extremely efficient judge of usefulness. If your pet language isn't taking off like a rocket and displacing the competitors, then it's because it isn't much better (maybe even worse) than the existing solutions.
- majormajor 14y ago
  Most web apps have a very low bar of good enough when it comes to language requirements. Especially when solid frameworks have already been written for alternative languages. Right now I'm doing Rails—Ruby isn't the absolute first language I'd choose, all things being equal, but it's good enough that I don't have a lot of motivation to use something else. (Previously, though, I was doing work on ancient Java servlets apps without any additional framework. That was frustrating enough to make me look for something else!)
6ren 14y ago
> Haskell is a language that rewards those who sit back and deeply analyse the > problem, and them produce a beautiful solution. Upfront design is the opposite of agile. As Douglas Adams said, knowing what the problem actually is is often the difficult bit. The very concept of "correctness" rests upon you already knowing the problem well enough to precisely define it. Haskell is to programming as pure mathematics is to accounting. EDIT: The idea of agile is iteration (aka trial-and-error). While Agile aims at understanding client needs, the concept derives from experimentation - part of the scientific method. It's also used in engineering research, I haven't failed 1000 times, I've discovered 1000 ways that don't work; in human-powered flight (reconfigurable hardware for new trials every day, instead of twice a year) going back to the Wright Brothers trying to understand flight control - they invented the wind-tunnel, to iterate designs quickly, easily, cheaply, safely (and spent 3 years on it even so). Even pure mathematicians iterate, trying different approaches. Trial-and-error is a given in research, differing only in the level/domain of interest.
- astrodust 14y ago
  Good luck achieving your sprint deliverable when all you have is some ideas! That's one of my main misgivings about a hard-line agile approach. It is good for shops focused on engineering simple problems or doing routine technical work. It breaks down completely in more research-driven domains. The hard problems are the ones where you bang your head against the wall with no tangible progress, simply exploring the problem domain until you can get some traction, find a way to solve it, but often your first few attempts lead to a sub-optimal solution you'd hate to commit to. Agile says go with it, fix it later. This is why we get stuck with crappy standards we'd all want to go back in time to fix. Some things require a more artistic approach where you grind away at the thing until it's actually solid. If Haskell is pure mathematics then there's no way you can shoehorn that into an agile box.
  - binspace 14y ago
    Actually, agile methodologies are good for situations where the problem itself (and even customer base) is in flux and not fully known (ie consumer facing web startups). Agile methodologies help lay a roadmap to facilitate communication and prioritization to/from developer, project management, and the customer(s). The solution may or may not be difficult, but finding the right problem to solve is paramount. The quality of the solution is often a product of the quality of the people working on the problem. Oh, and don't run out of money :-)
demian 14y ago
So, basically, nobody uses haskell because nobody uses haskell.
- nullspace 14y ago
  Network effects are hyper-exponential. I don't have citation for this, but it would explain why most things don't get mainstream attention even if they are good.
- ibotty 14y ago
  i think that's not right. see [1] from 2009 for a figure on haskell adoption. (but you are right, in that adoption plays a crucial role in adoption ;).) [1]: https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers/haskell-retrospective/Haskell-Erlang-Jun09.pdf https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/paper...
igorgue 14y ago
I love Haskell, I've been programming on it for about 5 years ,never professionally of course, but Haskell is just hard for everyone. Look, what's a Monad? Is it a "wrapper around function invocations"? (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?OnMonads http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?OnMonads) Or "a parameterized type which is an instance of the Monad type class, which defines >>= along with a few other operators. In layman's terms, a monad is just a type for which the >>= operation is defined" (http://stackoverflow.com/a/194207/29253 http://stackoverflow.com/a/194207/29253) this definition is so bad, starting by the fact that a class aint what you think it is if you come from Python or Ruby. Most people would just wait for "Learn Haskell The Hard Way" to finally understand some of its concepts that get overcomplicated by Haskellers because they want to be the only ones understanding it. I'm generalizing of course, but sometimes it feels that way, at least to me, since I don't have a CS or Math background.
- jonathansizz 14y ago
  Yes, Haskell is hard for everyone. Maybe I can speak on behalf of the stupid majority, but (having spent quite some time trying to learn Haskell) perhaps many of us who have at one time or another taken an interest have at some point ceased to find the effort worthwhile? The most annoying thing is that there seems to be an implicit assumption from a sizable part of the Haskell crowd that Haskell is demonstrably the programming pinnacle toward which all serious coders should be aiming; those of us who fall short of this goal must therefore feel chastened and embarrassed at our obvious inferiority. Well, at some point when I was grinding through Real World Haskell, trying to build software that actually did something useful, I just reached the point where I simply couldn't be bothered any more. But more fundamentally than this, I no longer believed that Haskell was better than all the other languages out there (because I can accomplish so much more so much quicker with several other languages that I know). And this is the assumption; just hang out with the Haskell community to see this.
- Drbble 14y ago
  Haskell is hard because it is a very powerful and high level language, with a sophisticated compiler (type checker for highly exotic types) and runtime (lazy evaluation system, not merely a bytecode VM). Most popular languages aren't nearly as sophisticated. You can write sophisticated programs in them, but the languages aren't as sophisticated.
nullspace 14y ago
I have been learning Haskell off and on for the last few weeks, and I can already see the elegance of it. It's given me some perception about how I can improve my code on more mainstream languages. I'll probably continue writing toy code with Haskell, but which is the most popular programming language that encourages a functional programming paradigm?
- Drbble 14y ago
  Clojure. But it's dynamically typed, not statically typed. And it is mostly eager not lazy, but is growing more laziness/fusion features. OCaml, static and functional, but eager not lazy, but it lacks JVM compatibility (and FFI to non-functional C doesn't help very much) so it tends to only work for problems that don't need to third party libraries.
  - jonathansizz 14y ago
    No they aren't. The question was "which is the most popular programming language that encourages a functional programming paradigm?". Common Lisp is easily the most popular language that fits this description. Both Clojure and OCaml are still very much niche languages, and certainly cannot be described as popular.
  - rlander 14y ago
    > And it is mostly eager not lazy, but is growing more laziness/fusion features. What? Eager sequence functions are the exception, not the rule; most are lazy.
secoif 14y ago
OT, but does anyone else notice that almost every interesting discussion on StackOverflow is deemed 'unconstructive' or 'not a real question' or 'subjective' then closed? Things like "What's the best x…" might not have a definitive, objective answer, but many good questions only have subjective answers. I wish they would reconsider this asshat of a policy because they're stifling a lot of good discussion that the community clearly wants to have, and finds constructive, regardless of what the moderators believe.
DanWaterworth 14y ago
I don't know why people say Haskell is difficult. It's certainly different, but once you know Haskell (which is perhaps the difficult step) you'll find that you can, and that you are even encouraged to, hand over much of your responsibility to think to the type checker. Haskell makes you lazy, in a good way.
balloot 14y ago
I would say there's two clear reasons functional languages are relatively rare in the professional world: 1) Functional languages are difficult to grasp. Maybe it's the way CS is taught, but I've never heard someone say "Haskell just comes intuitively to me, but I just can't get how to work effectively in PHP". You hear the same statement the other way around all the time. The bottom line is if you have multiple tools to do the same job, and one has a huge learning curve and one has a tiny learning curve, the choice of tool is obvious. 2) Haskell doesn't have a clear application it's "good" at. If you learn PHP, Python, or Ruby, you can throw together a web application with little effort. If you learn Javascript, you can easily do front end web stuff, or if you're more adventurous, get into Node.js. If you learn the C family of languages you can write iOS apps, OS kernels, or games. What do you do with Haskell? I dunno.
- DanWaterworth 14y ago
  > What do you do with Haskell? Write massively concurrent and parallel programs with tools that, practically speaking, lead to a massive reduction in race conditions.
carterschonwald 14y ago
Who cares? Those who choose to use Haskell and leverage its awesome win! :-)
BasDirks 14y ago
Contrary to popular believe in our community, many programmers are of average intelligence, discipline and curiosity. Haskell (as well as plenty of other technologies) will be too much effort for this group. Is this a taboo? Or elitist? I wonder why people desire so for the mainstream adoption of Haskell. I smell empty motives. Haskell seems to have done fine without mainstream recognition.
lcargill99 14y ago
Because language wars.

43 points by Cieplak 14y ago

Tough love: because Haskell proponents spend all their time ruminating on the beauty and purity of their preferred language instead of writing useful and novel software. No one whines about why, say, coffeescript is used so little in the industry. They just go out and use it. (Edit: to be clear, I'm not comparing coffeescript and Haskell as languages. I'm comparing the cultures around them. One "team" has a new toy and is excitedly building stuff with it; there's now a whole community of great stuff available with real applications. The other... has some interesting tools available if you look, but no energy. And they spend their time wondering why and NOT excitedly building stuff.)

true_religion 14y ago
Kind of an unfair comparision... Coffeescript compiles to Javascript. Sure, GHC Haskell might have once compiled to C but no one was expected to actually read the C code. Reading the Javascript code is pretty much unavoidable with Coffeescript because debugging utilities don't exist for it at all.
- pufuwozu 14y ago
  I know quite a few people that use Scala in place of Haskell just because it runs on the JVM. Interoperability matters.
- Groxx 14y ago
  So it's an unfair comparison in favor of Coffeescript because Coffeescript has inadequate tools? I don't see the rationale here. Especially since the vast majority of javascript out there is minified, especially when it has been generated by something like Coffeescript. Nobody is expected to actually read the minified code.
pufuwozu 14y ago
I write useful and novel software. I'm doing that right now in Haskell. It's also deployed to Heroku. You wouldn't know it's written in Haskell if I didn't tell you. Saying that X (CoffeeScript) proponents make more useful/novel software than Y (Haskell) proponents is pretty crazy.
- ajross 14y ago
  I said no such thing. I said coffeescript proponents don't whine about it. There's a culture in mainstream open source about "getting things done". People make stuff and show it off, and the value is what they made, not how they did it. Haskell lacks that culture, as evidenced by the premise behind this question.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - jamesbritt 14y ago
    Haskell may lack the promotional aspect. I'm a casual Haskell enthusiast and have no trouble finding interesting useful Haskell apps. But that may be because I now know where to look. Or have taken the time to find things. So Haskell has a culture of making things but may lack the "show it off" part.
mquander 14y ago
Should I be reading something out of this comment other than a totally ridiculous insult? I would flag it and move on if it wasn't coming from someone whose contributions I normally enjoy. - You seem to be saying that Haskell people are per capita less productive (or more "whiny?") than people writing in other languages. I have no idea why you think this is true, because I don't know any good way to even find out how many people know Haskell. Please show even the slightest bit of evidence. - Are you kidding me? Go Google "coffeescript usage" (better yet: "why coffeescript") and see page after page of people writing why they're using Coffeescript, why they're not using Coffeescript, asking if anyone else is using Coffeescript, telling people to use Coffeescript, ad infinitum. People like to talk about who is using every single piece of technology on this planet.
- Drbble 14y ago
  Not less per capita, but far far less capita.
- ajross 14y ago
  The meaning of "tough love" is that I'm trying to provide some needed advice, which I recognize in advance may be misinterpreted as an insult. I meant it sincerely. I don't care whether or not people "talk about" Haskell, that's not my point at all. People will start using it (which is the answer to the linked question) when Haskell starts doing things that are better than what is available elsewhere. It isn't. If it's a better environment for doing, say, MVC web frameworks then make something that competes with rails. If it's faster than C (I hear this a lot), then write some system middleware that clearly improves on the existing stuff. And stop asking why people aren't using it!

jonathansizz 14y ago

Answer: it should be clear by now that the mainstream has decided that any viable language must have an Algol-like structure. It's as simple as that; that's what industry languages look like. They are familiar, comfortable and just have an 'industrial' feel to them.

eli_gottlieb 14y ago
There are several other issues than just that. Haskell's bondage-and-discipline insistence on functional purity makes it very difficult to mix multiple kinds of effects. If you only use one kind of effect, There's a Monad for That (and you probably don't even have to understand monads!), but once you want to use multiple kinds, you suddenly need to really understand monad machinery (transformers, combinators, etc.). And if you're avoiding monads and comonads, you have to use entirely separate purely-functional data structures. In addition, Haskell's strong emphasis on statically-determined behavior over run-time decision making creates a language prone to unextensible software. It's not that functional programming and static typing are not useful; it's that industrial programming can take much better of object-oriented and dynamic features, specifically the modularity and extensibility of classes and virtual methods, than of functional and static features. Haskell is suitable for code that you write once, perfectly, but industry needs a language for software you write again and again, never quite right but good enough to ship.
- philwelch 14y ago
  It turns out that purely functional data structures are useful anyway as a solution to concurrency, though.
  - Drbble 14y ago
    Immutable structures, yes. And you can get those without Haskell's other baggage. Haskell is great for research in persistent data structures because it is impossible to cheat. But then it is more industry-practical to port the algorithms than write an application in Haskell. check out Google's MapReduce and Flume papers, for example.

adam-f 14y ago

My experience with it has been mostly fighting with enabling various language extensions to get some (real) sample programs working. The algol languages are much easier to debug compile issues, Haskell's purity makes certain issues non-obvious and complicated. Also, I think Stevey satirized the situation quite nicely. http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/12/haskell-researchers-announce-discovery.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/12/haskell-researchers-...

maeon3 14y ago

The internet is an extremely efficient judge of usefulness. If your pet language isn't taking off like a rocket and displacing the competitors, then it's because it isn't much better (maybe even worse) than the existing solutions.

majormajor 14y ago
Most web apps have a very low bar of good enough when it comes to language requirements. Especially when solid frameworks have already been written for alternative languages. Right now I'm doing Rails—Ruby isn't the absolute first language I'd choose, all things being equal, but it's good enough that I don't have a lot of motivation to use something else. (Previously, though, I was doing work on ancient Java servlets apps without any additional framework. That was frustrating enough to make me look for something else!)

6ren 14y ago

> Haskell is a language that rewards those who sit back and deeply analyse the > problem, and them produce a beautiful solution. Upfront design is the opposite of agile. As Douglas Adams said, knowing what the problem actually is is often the difficult bit. The very concept of "correctness" rests upon you already knowing the problem well enough to precisely define it. Haskell is to programming as pure mathematics is to accounting. EDIT: The idea of agile is iteration (aka trial-and-error). While Agile aims at understanding client needs, the concept derives from experimentation - part of the scientific method. It's also used in engineering research, I haven't failed 1000 times, I've discovered 1000 ways that don't work; in human-powered flight (reconfigurable hardware for new trials every day, instead of twice a year) going back to the Wright Brothers trying to understand flight control - they invented the wind-tunnel, to iterate designs quickly, easily, cheaply, safely (and spent 3 years on it even so). Even pure mathematicians iterate, trying different approaches. Trial-and-error is a given in research, differing only in the level/domain of interest.

astrodust 14y ago
Good luck achieving your sprint deliverable when all you have is some ideas! That's one of my main misgivings about a hard-line agile approach. It is good for shops focused on engineering simple problems or doing routine technical work. It breaks down completely in more research-driven domains. The hard problems are the ones where you bang your head against the wall with no tangible progress, simply exploring the problem domain until you can get some traction, find a way to solve it, but often your first few attempts lead to a sub-optimal solution you'd hate to commit to. Agile says go with it, fix it later. This is why we get stuck with crappy standards we'd all want to go back in time to fix. Some things require a more artistic approach where you grind away at the thing until it's actually solid. If Haskell is pure mathematics then there's no way you can shoehorn that into an agile box.
- binspace 14y ago
  Actually, agile methodologies are good for situations where the problem itself (and even customer base) is in flux and not fully known (ie consumer facing web startups). Agile methodologies help lay a roadmap to facilitate communication and prioritization to/from developer, project management, and the customer(s). The solution may or may not be difficult, but finding the right problem to solve is paramount. The quality of the solution is often a product of the quality of the people working on the problem. Oh, and don't run out of money :-)

demian 14y ago

So, basically, nobody uses haskell because nobody uses haskell.

nullspace 14y ago
Network effects are hyper-exponential. I don't have citation for this, but it would explain why most things don't get mainstream attention even if they are good.
ibotty 14y ago
i think that's not right. see [1] from 2009 for a figure on haskell adoption. (but you are right, in that adoption plays a crucial role in adoption ;).) [1]: https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers/haskell-retrospective/Haskell-Erlang-Jun09.pdf https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/paper...

igorgue 14y ago

I love Haskell, I've been programming on it for about 5 years ,never professionally of course, but Haskell is just hard for everyone. Look, what's a Monad? Is it a "wrapper around function invocations"? (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?OnMonads http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?OnMonads) Or "a parameterized type which is an instance of the Monad type class, which defines >>= along with a few other operators. In layman's terms, a monad is just a type for which the >>= operation is defined" (http://stackoverflow.com/a/194207/29253 http://stackoverflow.com/a/194207/29253) this definition is so bad, starting by the fact that a class aint what you think it is if you come from Python or Ruby. Most people would just wait for "Learn Haskell The Hard Way" to finally understand some of its concepts that get overcomplicated by Haskellers because they want to be the only ones understanding it. I'm generalizing of course, but sometimes it feels that way, at least to me, since I don't have a CS or Math background.

jonathansizz 14y ago
Yes, Haskell is hard for everyone. Maybe I can speak on behalf of the stupid majority, but (having spent quite some time trying to learn Haskell) perhaps many of us who have at one time or another taken an interest have at some point ceased to find the effort worthwhile? The most annoying thing is that there seems to be an implicit assumption from a sizable part of the Haskell crowd that Haskell is demonstrably the programming pinnacle toward which all serious coders should be aiming; those of us who fall short of this goal must therefore feel chastened and embarrassed at our obvious inferiority. Well, at some point when I was grinding through Real World Haskell, trying to build software that actually did something useful, I just reached the point where I simply couldn't be bothered any more. But more fundamentally than this, I no longer believed that Haskell was better than all the other languages out there (because I can accomplish so much more so much quicker with several other languages that I know). And this is the assumption; just hang out with the Haskell community to see this.
Drbble 14y ago
Haskell is hard because it is a very powerful and high level language, with a sophisticated compiler (type checker for highly exotic types) and runtime (lazy evaluation system, not merely a bytecode VM). Most popular languages aren't nearly as sophisticated. You can write sophisticated programs in them, but the languages aren't as sophisticated.

nullspace 14y ago

I have been learning Haskell off and on for the last few weeks, and I can already see the elegance of it. It's given me some perception about how I can improve my code on more mainstream languages. I'll probably continue writing toy code with Haskell, but which is the most popular programming language that encourages a functional programming paradigm?

Drbble 14y ago
Clojure. But it's dynamically typed, not statically typed. And it is mostly eager not lazy, but is growing more laziness/fusion features. OCaml, static and functional, but eager not lazy, but it lacks JVM compatibility (and FFI to non-functional C doesn't help very much) so it tends to only work for problems that don't need to third party libraries.
- jonathansizz 14y ago
  No they aren't. The question was "which is the most popular programming language that encourages a functional programming paradigm?". Common Lisp is easily the most popular language that fits this description. Both Clojure and OCaml are still very much niche languages, and certainly cannot be described as popular.
- rlander 14y ago
  > And it is mostly eager not lazy, but is growing more laziness/fusion features. What? Eager sequence functions are the exception, not the rule; most are lazy.

secoif 14y ago

OT, but does anyone else notice that almost every interesting discussion on StackOverflow is deemed 'unconstructive' or 'not a real question' or 'subjective' then closed? Things like "What's the best x…" might not have a definitive, objective answer, but many good questions only have subjective answers. I wish they would reconsider this asshat of a policy because they're stifling a lot of good discussion that the community clearly wants to have, and finds constructive, regardless of what the moderators believe.

DanWaterworth 14y ago

I don't know why people say Haskell is difficult. It's certainly different, but once you know Haskell (which is perhaps the difficult step) you'll find that you can, and that you are even encouraged to, hand over much of your responsibility to think to the type checker. Haskell makes you lazy, in a good way.

balloot 14y ago

I would say there's two clear reasons functional languages are relatively rare in the professional world: 1) Functional languages are difficult to grasp. Maybe it's the way CS is taught, but I've never heard someone say "Haskell just comes intuitively to me, but I just can't get how to work effectively in PHP". You hear the same statement the other way around all the time. The bottom line is if you have multiple tools to do the same job, and one has a huge learning curve and one has a tiny learning curve, the choice of tool is obvious. 2) Haskell doesn't have a clear application it's "good" at. If you learn PHP, Python, or Ruby, you can throw together a web application with little effort. If you learn Javascript, you can easily do front end web stuff, or if you're more adventurous, get into Node.js. If you learn the C family of languages you can write iOS apps, OS kernels, or games. What do you do with Haskell? I dunno.

DanWaterworth 14y ago
> What do you do with Haskell? Write massively concurrent and parallel programs with tools that, practically speaking, lead to a massive reduction in race conditions.

carterschonwald 14y ago

Who cares? Those who choose to use Haskell and leverage its awesome win! :-)

BasDirks 14y ago

Contrary to popular believe in our community, many programmers are of average intelligence, discipline and curiosity. Haskell (as well as plenty of other technologies) will be too much effort for this group. Is this a taboo? Or elitist? I wonder why people desire so for the mainstream adoption of Haskell. I smell empty motives. Haskell seems to have done fine without mainstream recognition.

lcargill99 14y ago

Because language wars.