5 ms·

Haskell could be a great practical language if some constraints were introduced, e.g. limiting the language extensions used. https://www.simplehaskell.org https

by nextos 2y ago

Haskell could be a great practical language if some constraints were introduced, e.g. limiting the language extensions used. https://www.simplehaskell.org https://www.simplehaskell.org attempted to do this and, currently, https://neohaskell.org https://neohaskell.org is going in the same direction. After all, Haskell '98 is not that hard. Personally, I think Haskell, or something like Haskell, is going to be reasonably popular in the near future. Functional programming and an expressive type system are great for ML-powered synthesis. You provide the type signature, and the machine fills in the function body. Furthermore, with dependent or refinement types, the solution can be verified to be correct.

BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
Maybe I'm completely wrong (as an outside than never touched anything ML other than OCaml), but Idris 2 does seem like a "clean Haskell" minus the laziness.
7thaccount 2y ago
I'm not fully convinced. FP is such a different paradigm than the leading imperative/OO design that most are comfortable with. Other languages that are too different like lisp, forth, Apl, Haskell, and Prolog are just too different for the average person IMO. I've given Haskell/OCaml/F# a go a few times and enjoy learning new paradigms and it certainly didn't click for me. I have a feeling it'll be even harder with more normal people not into this as a hobby. Here is how to read a text file in Haskell (I assume a standard way): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7867723/haskell-file-reading https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7867723/haskell-file-rea... From a Python tutorial: https://www.pythontutorial.net/python-basics/python-read-text-file/ https://www.pythontutorial.net/python-basics/python-read-tex... I could be biased, but it certainly seems like Python has a lot less conceptual hurdles here. You basically specify a filepath and then for loop through each line and print. The Haskell solution requires more steps and theory. I know Haskell is a very awesome and cool language and super powerful for all kinds of uses that Python may be inferior at (example compilers). You'll get no argument there. I'm just pointing out that I think wide adoption may be difficult. I drank the koolaid and read dozens of blog posts and a couple of Haskell books and really wanted to make it work. I'm an engineer and like math and puzzles and learning new programming languages...and yet I couldn't make it that far (without sinking a whole lot more time into it than I had) and ultimately gave up.
- tromp 2y ago
  > The Haskell solution requires more steps and theory. Really? The suggested Haskell solution is main = do contents <- readFile "test.txt" print . map readInt . words $ contents which is no more complex than the Python code. The entire file contents is read as a String into content. words breaks it into a list of words, and readInt parses each word into an Int. Finally the list of ints is printed.
  - 7thaccount 2y ago
    I'd say a lot more is going on there conceptually than the Python code. Imagine through the eyes of a beginner. You have some main do thing, then you appear to read it all into memory and assign a variable, then you do a bunch of composition to words and readInt and map it to print? With the python version, you see the file handle as a variable and then for loop on that iterable and you can print each line or parse it however you want. Even when I was learning to program and had no clue what an iterable object was, there seemed to be an obvious three line idiom for processing text files that was easy to use.
  - yodsanklai 2y ago
    yes, it looks all good, until you want to change it. For instance, to make the file name a CLI parameter, you need to understand things like type classes, specifically Monad, Functor and Applicative. You may need a long time to be at ease with these things and a superficial understanding will not take you very far. In Python, it'll take you a few minutes to do the same thing.
    - cess11 2y ago
      What do you mean by "long time"? Why wouldn't it apply just the same to some Python file that defines a Maybe with a bit of unwrap and bind and orElse or whatever? Instead of things going boom and spewing a stack sometimes they just go Nothing instead, you don't need much more understanding than that. There is a lot of syntax in Haskell that is somewhat hard to understand at first but you don't actually need it to write stuff yourself. This idea that you need to talk a particular way and be able to teach CS theory at uni and whatnot to build stuff in Haskell is probably not very healthy.
ClayShentrup 2y ago
Haskell even on a bad day is radically more sane then all of these languages doing this bizarre obsession with foo.bar() instead of bar(foo), because they only allow overloading on the first arg. semantic indenting. type inference. automatic laziness. it's just another level.

by nextos 2y ago

BoingBoomTschak 2y ago

Maybe I'm completely wrong (as an outside than never touched anything ML other than OCaml), but Idris 2 does seem like a "clean Haskell" minus the laziness.

7thaccount 2y ago

I'm not fully convinced. FP is such a different paradigm than the leading imperative/OO design that most are comfortable with. Other languages that are too different like lisp, forth, Apl, Haskell, and Prolog are just too different for the average person IMO. I've given Haskell/OCaml/F# a go a few times and enjoy learning new paradigms and it certainly didn't click for me. I have a feeling it'll be even harder with more normal people not into this as a hobby. Here is how to read a text file in Haskell (I assume a standard way): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7867723/haskell-file-reading https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7867723/haskell-file-rea... From a Python tutorial: https://www.pythontutorial.net/python-basics/python-read-text-file/ https://www.pythontutorial.net/python-basics/python-read-tex... I could be biased, but it certainly seems like Python has a lot less conceptual hurdles here. You basically specify a filepath and then for loop through each line and print. The Haskell solution requires more steps and theory. I know Haskell is a very awesome and cool language and super powerful for all kinds of uses that Python may be inferior at (example compilers). You'll get no argument there. I'm just pointing out that I think wide adoption may be difficult. I drank the koolaid and read dozens of blog posts and a couple of Haskell books and really wanted to make it work. I'm an engineer and like math and puzzles and learning new programming languages...and yet I couldn't make it that far (without sinking a whole lot more time into it than I had) and ultimately gave up.

tromp 2y ago
> The Haskell solution requires more steps and theory. Really? The suggested Haskell solution is main = do contents <- readFile "test.txt" print . map readInt . words $ contents which is no more complex than the Python code. The entire file contents is read as a String into content. words breaks it into a list of words, and readInt parses each word into an Int. Finally the list of ints is printed.
- 7thaccount 2y ago
  I'd say a lot more is going on there conceptually than the Python code. Imagine through the eyes of a beginner. You have some main do thing, then you appear to read it all into memory and assign a variable, then you do a bunch of composition to words and readInt and map it to print? With the python version, you see the file handle as a variable and then for loop on that iterable and you can print each line or parse it however you want. Even when I was learning to program and had no clue what an iterable object was, there seemed to be an obvious three line idiom for processing text files that was easy to use.
- yodsanklai 2y ago
  yes, it looks all good, until you want to change it. For instance, to make the file name a CLI parameter, you need to understand things like type classes, specifically Monad, Functor and Applicative. You may need a long time to be at ease with these things and a superficial understanding will not take you very far. In Python, it'll take you a few minutes to do the same thing.
  - cess11 2y ago
    What do you mean by "long time"? Why wouldn't it apply just the same to some Python file that defines a Maybe with a bit of unwrap and bind and orElse or whatever? Instead of things going boom and spewing a stack sometimes they just go Nothing instead, you don't need much more understanding than that. There is a lot of syntax in Haskell that is somewhat hard to understand at first but you don't actually need it to write stuff yourself. This idea that you need to talk a particular way and be able to teach CS theory at uni and whatnot to build stuff in Haskell is probably not very healthy.

ClayShentrup 2y ago

Haskell even on a bad day is radically more sane then all of these languages doing this bizarre obsession with foo.bar() instead of bar(foo), because they only allow overloading on the first arg. semantic indenting. type inference. automatic laziness. it's just another level.