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Haskell is an elegant language but Haskell fans will be much more effective advocates of the language if they admit that it's conceptually very difficult for mo

Haskell is an elegant language but Haskell fans will be much more effective advocates of the language if they admit that it's conceptually very difficult for most programmers to grasp. Some of the most experienced and capable programmers I've ever known have struggled to get their head around Haskell, and I don't buy the argument that it's only because their minds have been poisoned by overexposure to other languages. Haskell is important and I'm glad it exists but I think Go has a much better chance of become a plausible alternative to Java and C++ and perhaps Python in most programming shops.

dlisboa 14y ago
> and I don't buy the argument that it's _only_ because their minds have been poisoned by overexposure to other languages. I've not heard that argument. I think most Haskell people would acknowledge theirs is not an easy language to learn and program. The argument is especially non-stick because in practicality every programmer will be "poisoned" by other languages. That means that even if Haskell wasn't a hard language to learn in theory (i.e. if a "virgin" brain could learn it just fine), in practice it will be. It's easier to expand on the solid points of the language, not easiness of understanding. But like I said, I've not seen Haskell being thrown around in that fashion.
- dbaupp 14y ago
  And to add to that, many Haskell people freely admit that they themselves barely understand all of Haskell, or still have much to learn.
Raphael_Amiard 14y ago
I think Simon Peyton Jones says it best about Haskell : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSmkqocn0oQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSmkqocn0oQ He says Haskell is useless. Without even debating that (it can certainly be useful for certain classes of programming problems), you can see his point : The goal of Haskell was to start from an ideal view (pure functional programming without side effects) and try and see how to make that eventually practical for everyday programming, without sacrificing the pure core of the language. You have languages, like F# (or even C# !) that takes lessons from Haskell, with at the same time being practical for pretty much every programming task (their platform , .Net, makes them useless for a lot of use cases, but that is another problem) And on the other side (in my opinion), you have languages like Go, being pretty dismissive about pretty much everything learned from languages like Haskell. I respect the point of view of Go's creator, i just disagree with it, and don't see any project i could do in Go that i wouldn't prefer doing in Scala/OCaml/C#. But more power to people who want to do great things in Go ! Go fills a niche (AOT compiled without a VM) that only OCaml fills in the list of languages i have listed, and OCaml is probably much more complicated to learn, even if it is way simpler than Haskell, so even if i don't agree with the design choices, i can see why Go could gain traction (apart from the fact that it is Google powered)
- kenko 14y ago
  Peyton-Jones said that Haskell was useless before they got a handle on how to do IO. Haskell is clearly not useless at present.
  - meaty 14y ago
    However it's far harder to make it not useless than other choices. To me at least, Haskell appears to be alphabet soup like badly written Perl. The syntax is so close to the metal it's unreal.
    - pcwalton 14y ago
      SPJ's comment had nothing to do with lexical syntax.

dlisboa 14y ago

> and I don't buy the argument that it's _only_ because their minds have been poisoned by overexposure to other languages. I've not heard that argument. I think most Haskell people would acknowledge theirs is not an easy language to learn and program. The argument is especially non-stick because in practicality every programmer will be "poisoned" by other languages. That means that even if Haskell wasn't a hard language to learn in theory (i.e. if a "virgin" brain could learn it just fine), in practice it will be. It's easier to expand on the solid points of the language, not easiness of understanding. But like I said, I've not seen Haskell being thrown around in that fashion.

dbaupp 14y ago
And to add to that, many Haskell people freely admit that they themselves barely understand all of Haskell, or still have much to learn.

Raphael_Amiard 14y ago

I think Simon Peyton Jones says it best about Haskell : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSmkqocn0oQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSmkqocn0oQ He says Haskell is useless. Without even debating that (it can certainly be useful for certain classes of programming problems), you can see his point : The goal of Haskell was to start from an ideal view (pure functional programming without side effects) and try and see how to make that eventually practical for everyday programming, without sacrificing the pure core of the language. You have languages, like F# (or even C# !) that takes lessons from Haskell, with at the same time being practical for pretty much every programming task (their platform , .Net, makes them useless for a lot of use cases, but that is another problem) And on the other side (in my opinion), you have languages like Go, being pretty dismissive about pretty much everything learned from languages like Haskell. I respect the point of view of Go's creator, i just disagree with it, and don't see any project i could do in Go that i wouldn't prefer doing in Scala/OCaml/C#. But more power to people who want to do great things in Go ! Go fills a niche (AOT compiled without a VM) that only OCaml fills in the list of languages i have listed, and OCaml is probably much more complicated to learn, even if it is way simpler than Haskell, so even if i don't agree with the design choices, i can see why Go could gain traction (apart from the fact that it is Google powered)

kenko 14y ago
Peyton-Jones said that Haskell was useless before they got a handle on how to do IO. Haskell is clearly not useless at present.
- meaty 14y ago
  However it's far harder to make it not useless than other choices. To me at least, Haskell appears to be alphabet soup like badly written Perl. The syntax is so close to the metal it's unreal.
  - pcwalton 14y ago
    SPJ's comment had nothing to do with lexical syntax.