4 ms·

It's interesting that we've known results such as these for 30(+) years, yet 99.999% of all software is still written in outright miserable languages such as Py

by jlouis 2y ago

It's interesting that we've known results such as these for 30(+) years, yet 99.999% of all software is still written in outright miserable languages such as Python or Javascript...

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
Its especially sad to see many YC companies falling for writing JavaScript.
- epolanski 2y ago
  No it's not why would it? Monocole-wielding elitist opinions like these scream to me very low productivity environments that would spend weeks on reinventing the wheel rather than getting to market fast. I love and practice Haskell, but anybody thinking that technologies like these are fit for fast moving startups are absolutely delusional. You can easily setup a monorepo and release quickly mobile/native/web/apis and whatever with excellent editor and ecosystem support in TypeScript, good luck achieving that on alternative languages. Last but not least, 99% of people like you criticizing JavaScript have never seen what kind of great goodies there are in the ecosystem, even for writing pure functional programming that scales, e.g. with Effect-ts[1] [1] https://effect.website/ https://effect.website/
  - atq2119 2y ago
    Paul Graham is a major Lisp advocate, attributing a non-trivial part of his own early success to it. So there are all those good reasons for it, but it's still a little weird.
    - epolanski 2y ago
      No, PG advocating for Lisp because he has had a good experience with it 30 years ago is not a "good reason". Build a tech team around lisp in your startup then task somebody with scraping a website or handling session tokens refreshing and see the results. At some point people should ask themselves why there's so little killer software written in Lisps or pure functional languages (besides extremely rare exceptions like Emacs or Datomic) when modest and much hated languages like PHP have plenty.
      - mrkeen 2y ago
        > scraping a website or handling session tokens refreshing and see the results Have done this task at work - taking a Java crawler and modifying it to be able to navigate saml-based auth. It's the goddamn pervasive mutation that kills you everytime. The original author will make assumptions like "I can just put my cookies here, and read from them later". And it works for a while, until you add more threads, or crawl different domains, or someone attempts some thread-safety by storing cookies in shudder thread-locals. (This was actually the project that convinced me that I'll never be able to diagnose or fix a race condition with a step-through debugger.) I was so fed up with this task that I whipped up a Haskell version at home. I then used that as a standard to test the Java work crawler against - by comparing mitmproxy dumps. If the Java version didn't do what the Haskell version did, I hacked on it some more.
  - skydhash 2y ago
    The issue isn’t the quality of libraries, and as you said, there are nice ones out there. The issue is the churn and dependency management. And as for fast moving startups, the most important factor will always be the problem (and it’s myriad sub problem) and hiring. Selecting a language is dependent on those.
  - ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
    Okay, since you made quite a good argument, I will give you my counter. The primary problem with JavaScript is that one, the entire ecosystem is prone to breaking. It is a very brittle system. Next, TypeScript gives you an allure of safety, but at the edges it breaks down because underneath it, it's all just untyped JavaScript. And the last and the most important one is because it makes it so easy to wrap functions in each other and there are no patterns at all, there is a lot of indirection in most typescript code bases. This causes API surface area bloat which becomes hard to maintain in the long term. And tooling doesn't completely solve for this problem either. I have seen code bases where the LSP struggles because of tons of generic types. I think the most pragmatic alternative is Golang if you are building APIs. And for a full stackish framework Phoenix and Elixir is a great choice. Or you can just go all in on Rust like my companies and you get the best of everything.
    - riku_iki 2y ago
      JS/TS primary target is running interactive code in webbrowser. What are the good alternatives?
      - ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
        Sure if you are building a highly interactive app like Google maps go crazy on the javascript but keep it only for that.
        riku_iki 2y ago
        I think some business SPA is heavily benefited from JS/TS too.
ulbu 2y ago
so many people are enchanted by quick results.. it’s the same psychology as that of enchantment by LLMs.. and they exert the same pull as tiktok reels. you get results, who cares when they have no correctness tying them together.
- johnisgood 2y ago
  I prefer results WITH correctness, however, and I can utilize the LLM for that. I mentioned it in my previous comment.
  - ulbu 2y ago
    I said underlying, not apparent. or in other words, it’s incorrect until you say it’s correct, or “close enough, I’ll take over from here”.
gklitz 2y ago
Interesting take on the paper. From my perspective I’d say that developing this wouldn’t take 8 hours in python or JavaScript, but it might just be a preference thing. These days I’d be surprise if asking Copilot to start the product wouldn’t cut of the equivalent of 6hours of the Haskell development time.
IshKebab 2y ago
I don't think you can be surprised that Python or Javascript are more popular than Haskell. Just the monad thing rules it out entirely. I would say ML might have been a more popular language, but again it's just a bit too weird for people that aren't deeply into academics / PL research. Also the tooling is just bad, even to this day. (Tbf that is true of Python too.)
- cess11 2y ago
  Monads aren't weird. Basically it's data structures you can map over and flatten, like a list or a maybe/result/option. Everyone who isn't extremely junior knows about them. There's some theory that ties into formal systems and blah blah blah, but you sure don't need to be janking your monoid in public to understand and use monads. As for tooling, few people actually want immersive, robust tooling. If that was popular things like Pharo and Allegro wouldn't be niche. Most want crude text editing with pretty colours and not much more.
  - nuancebydefault 2y ago
    'Weirdness' is, as this conversation confirms, in the eye if the beholder. I _find_ ruby weird and non-intuitive.
    - cess11 2y ago
      It's a claim that monads are somehow supernatural, twists of reality, which is obviously not the case since a lot of people who have never learnt the word monad are using them daily in the form of Optional style types and lists and so on.
  - gklitz 2y ago
    > Monads aren't weird. Basically it's … Says everyone after having spent months getting the hang of it and more months writing blogs about how everyone is wrong to think it’s difficult because when you think about it “ A Monad is just a Monoid in the Category of Endofunctors” It’s incredible just how blind most programmers are to the time they spend on learning things to come to the point where they think a subject is simple and how they all assume that any junior should just listen to their magical recital of a boiled down explanation and immediately understand it at a fundamental level.
fbn79 2y ago
It's not Haskell, but you can write great functional programming code with Javascript. I think it is very ergonomic for FP. Remember that Javascript is the world's most misunderstood programming language =))
- macintux 2y ago
  As much as I appreciate the FP features of Python, I much prefer a language that enforces immutability. Constraints like that make the code easier to understand, reduces the number of possible bugs.
  - mrkeen 2y ago
    At this stage in my life, when I'm beginning to give up on immutability being taken seriously, I'd almost settle for proper immutable collections being provided alongside the mutable ones. I really just want to combine Sets and Maps the way I combine numbers and strings.
James_K 2y ago
Note that these languages are not included in the paper, so this is merely a speculation as to their performance.

by jlouis 2y ago

It's interesting that we've known results such as these for 30(+) years, yet 99.999% of all software is still written in outright miserable languages such as Python or Javascript...

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago

Its especially sad to see many YC companies falling for writing JavaScript.

epolanski 2y ago
No it's not why would it? Monocole-wielding elitist opinions like these scream to me very low productivity environments that would spend weeks on reinventing the wheel rather than getting to market fast. I love and practice Haskell, but anybody thinking that technologies like these are fit for fast moving startups are absolutely delusional. You can easily setup a monorepo and release quickly mobile/native/web/apis and whatever with excellent editor and ecosystem support in TypeScript, good luck achieving that on alternative languages. Last but not least, 99% of people like you criticizing JavaScript have never seen what kind of great goodies there are in the ecosystem, even for writing pure functional programming that scales, e.g. with Effect-ts[1] [1] https://effect.website/ https://effect.website/
- atq2119 2y ago
  Paul Graham is a major Lisp advocate, attributing a non-trivial part of his own early success to it. So there are all those good reasons for it, but it's still a little weird.
  - epolanski 2y ago
    No, PG advocating for Lisp because he has had a good experience with it 30 years ago is not a "good reason". Build a tech team around lisp in your startup then task somebody with scraping a website or handling session tokens refreshing and see the results. At some point people should ask themselves why there's so little killer software written in Lisps or pure functional languages (besides extremely rare exceptions like Emacs or Datomic) when modest and much hated languages like PHP have plenty.
    - mrkeen 2y ago
      > scraping a website or handling session tokens refreshing and see the results Have done this task at work - taking a Java crawler and modifying it to be able to navigate saml-based auth. It's the goddamn pervasive mutation that kills you everytime. The original author will make assumptions like "I can just put my cookies here, and read from them later". And it works for a while, until you add more threads, or crawl different domains, or someone attempts some thread-safety by storing cookies in shudder thread-locals. (This was actually the project that convinced me that I'll never be able to diagnose or fix a race condition with a step-through debugger.) I was so fed up with this task that I whipped up a Haskell version at home. I then used that as a standard to test the Java work crawler against - by comparing mitmproxy dumps. If the Java version didn't do what the Haskell version did, I hacked on it some more.
- skydhash 2y ago
  The issue isn’t the quality of libraries, and as you said, there are nice ones out there. The issue is the churn and dependency management. And as for fast moving startups, the most important factor will always be the problem (and it’s myriad sub problem) and hiring. Selecting a language is dependent on those.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  Okay, since you made quite a good argument, I will give you my counter. The primary problem with JavaScript is that one, the entire ecosystem is prone to breaking. It is a very brittle system. Next, TypeScript gives you an allure of safety, but at the edges it breaks down because underneath it, it's all just untyped JavaScript. And the last and the most important one is because it makes it so easy to wrap functions in each other and there are no patterns at all, there is a lot of indirection in most typescript code bases. This causes API surface area bloat which becomes hard to maintain in the long term. And tooling doesn't completely solve for this problem either. I have seen code bases where the LSP struggles because of tons of generic types. I think the most pragmatic alternative is Golang if you are building APIs. And for a full stackish framework Phoenix and Elixir is a great choice. Or you can just go all in on Rust like my companies and you get the best of everything.
  - riku_iki 2y ago
    JS/TS primary target is running interactive code in webbrowser. What are the good alternatives?
    - ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
      Sure if you are building a highly interactive app like Google maps go crazy on the javascript but keep it only for that.
      - riku_iki 2y ago
        I think some business SPA is heavily benefited from JS/TS too.

ulbu 2y ago

so many people are enchanted by quick results.. it’s the same psychology as that of enchantment by LLMs.. and they exert the same pull as tiktok reels. you get results, who cares when they have no correctness tying them together.

johnisgood 2y ago
I prefer results WITH correctness, however, and I can utilize the LLM for that. I mentioned it in my previous comment.
- ulbu 2y ago
  I said underlying, not apparent. or in other words, it’s incorrect until you say it’s correct, or “close enough, I’ll take over from here”.

gklitz 2y ago

Interesting take on the paper. From my perspective I’d say that developing this wouldn’t take 8 hours in python or JavaScript, but it might just be a preference thing. These days I’d be surprise if asking Copilot to start the product wouldn’t cut of the equivalent of 6hours of the Haskell development time.

IshKebab 2y ago

I don't think you can be surprised that Python or Javascript are more popular than Haskell. Just the monad thing rules it out entirely. I would say ML might have been a more popular language, but again it's just a bit too weird for people that aren't deeply into academics / PL research. Also the tooling is just bad, even to this day. (Tbf that is true of Python too.)

cess11 2y ago
Monads aren't weird. Basically it's data structures you can map over and flatten, like a list or a maybe/result/option. Everyone who isn't extremely junior knows about them. There's some theory that ties into formal systems and blah blah blah, but you sure don't need to be janking your monoid in public to understand and use monads. As for tooling, few people actually want immersive, robust tooling. If that was popular things like Pharo and Allegro wouldn't be niche. Most want crude text editing with pretty colours and not much more.
- nuancebydefault 2y ago
  'Weirdness' is, as this conversation confirms, in the eye if the beholder. I _find_ ruby weird and non-intuitive.
  - cess11 2y ago
    It's a claim that monads are somehow supernatural, twists of reality, which is obviously not the case since a lot of people who have never learnt the word monad are using them daily in the form of Optional style types and lists and so on.
- gklitz 2y ago
  > Monads aren't weird. Basically it's … Says everyone after having spent months getting the hang of it and more months writing blogs about how everyone is wrong to think it’s difficult because when you think about it “ A Monad is just a Monoid in the Category of Endofunctors” It’s incredible just how blind most programmers are to the time they spend on learning things to come to the point where they think a subject is simple and how they all assume that any junior should just listen to their magical recital of a boiled down explanation and immediately understand it at a fundamental level.

fbn79 2y ago

It's not Haskell, but you can write great functional programming code with Javascript. I think it is very ergonomic for FP. Remember that Javascript is the world's most misunderstood programming language =))

macintux 2y ago
As much as I appreciate the FP features of Python, I much prefer a language that enforces immutability. Constraints like that make the code easier to understand, reduces the number of possible bugs.
- mrkeen 2y ago
  At this stage in my life, when I'm beginning to give up on immutability being taken seriously, I'd almost settle for proper immutable collections being provided alongside the mutable ones. I really just want to combine Sets and Maps the way I combine numbers and strings.

James_K 2y ago

Note that these languages are not included in the paper, so this is merely a speculation as to their performance.