4 ms·

Honestly, I find Go more difficult than Haskell

leishulang 14y ago
I spend 3 days and learned all features of Go. Haskell, I spend 3 month just to barely touch applicative functors and a bit monads. I am expecting another year if I need to truly fluent in haskell.
batista 14y ago
After you've learned both, maybe. But that is beside the point. Haskell is more difficult to learn.
- jimbokun 14y ago
  Probably not if that's what you start with. Carnegie Mellon now starts all CS students with ML, I believe. For those of us who learned to program in an imperative language first, the difficulty with learning functional programming is unlearning all of our bad habits.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    "Functional programming" is 10% of what makes Haskell difficult. The intricacies of laziness and existential types and opimizing higher order functions are more the problem.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - rfurmani 14y ago
      Very true. One of my first forays into Haskell came during the Google Code Jam, after seeing how short and elegant Reid Barton's solutions where. I solved the problems, but the programs were horribly slow, so I checked how Reid got around it: oh, he doesn't just map things and use the standard style, he needs some special constructs from the libraries.. it looks mathematically equivalent, but it looks plausible that the old way ends up holding onto too much data in memory. I eventually stopped when I realised that it would always take more time than hammering it out in C++, even if the final product in Haskell is shorter and more elegant. In fact, outside of writing APIs and frameworks, the desire for elegance seems debilitating. This also reminds me of how when I was most seriously practicing for Topcoder I could consistently produce shorter solutions than tomek (the top ranked guy far and away at that time) he would finish more quickly, since once he types it in it's done. For the record I'm now using Python (and some R) but I think I'd like Go.
  - e12e 14y ago
    At my college (www.ii.uib.no) they've restructured the "programming paradigms" course (basic compiler/language theory) from using Standard ML to using Haskell for the strongly typed functional bit. While I appreciate being forced to 'learn' Haksell -- I found Standard ML much easier than Haskell. I did manage to implement a small language for calculating numbers in both, in the end.
Evbn 14y ago
Go look at the Haskell code dons has written and come back and confirm or cancel your claim. Hint: dons studies Core to get the great performance his code achieves. People like dons can do amazing work in Haskell. There at 10x or 100x as many people who can't (not without at least a PhD's worth of study at least), but could be productive in Go on a large array of projects they need to do. /Studied haskell, hung out on #haskell, thinks its awesome, made me a better java programmer, but always gets blocked on showstoppers due to not knowing the incantations and deep type theory needed to structure a program for high performance and debug space leaks.

I spend 3 days and learned all features of Go. Haskell, I spend 3 month just to barely touch applicative functors and a bit monads. I am expecting another year if I need to truly fluent in haskell.

batista 14y ago

After you've learned both, maybe. But that is beside the point. Haskell is more difficult to learn.

jimbokun 14y ago
Probably not if that's what you start with. Carnegie Mellon now starts all CS students with ML, I believe. For those of us who learned to program in an imperative language first, the difficulty with learning functional programming is unlearning all of our bad habits.
- Evbn 14y ago
  "Functional programming" is 10% of what makes Haskell difficult. The intricacies of laziness and existential types and opimizing higher order functions are more the problem.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - rfurmani 14y ago
    Very true. One of my first forays into Haskell came during the Google Code Jam, after seeing how short and elegant Reid Barton's solutions where. I solved the problems, but the programs were horribly slow, so I checked how Reid got around it: oh, he doesn't just map things and use the standard style, he needs some special constructs from the libraries.. it looks mathematically equivalent, but it looks plausible that the old way ends up holding onto too much data in memory. I eventually stopped when I realised that it would always take more time than hammering it out in C++, even if the final product in Haskell is shorter and more elegant. In fact, outside of writing APIs and frameworks, the desire for elegance seems debilitating. This also reminds me of how when I was most seriously practicing for Topcoder I could consistently produce shorter solutions than tomek (the top ranked guy far and away at that time) he would finish more quickly, since once he types it in it's done. For the record I'm now using Python (and some R) but I think I'd like Go.
- e12e 14y ago
  At my college (www.ii.uib.no) they've restructured the "programming paradigms" course (basic compiler/language theory) from using Standard ML to using Haskell for the strongly typed functional bit. While I appreciate being forced to 'learn' Haksell -- I found Standard ML much easier than Haskell. I did manage to implement a small language for calculating numbers in both, in the end.

Evbn 14y ago

Go look at the Haskell code dons has written and come back and confirm or cancel your claim. Hint: dons studies Core to get the great performance his code achieves. People like dons can do amazing work in Haskell. There at 10x or 100x as many people who can't (not without at least a PhD's worth of study at least), but could be productive in Go on a large array of projects they need to do. /Studied haskell, hung out on #haskell, thinks its awesome, made me a better java programmer, but always gets blocked on showstoppers due to not knowing the incantations and deep type theory needed to structure a program for high performance and debug space leaks.