5 ms·

Have you ever tried doing any non-trivial work in Haskell? I've used it professionally, and spoken with a lot of other people who have, and exactly zero people

Have you ever tried doing any non-trivial work in Haskell? I've used it professionally, and spoken with a lot of other people who have, and exactly zero people have expressed an experience that the naming of operators has caused the language to be less practical for them. Some think it's less aesthetically pleasing than it could be, but that's not a practical concern. Furthermore, the specific operators you cite are confusing examples, given that ">>=" can be elided using do notation, "\" looks enough like a lambda that it took me a while to remember what you were referring to, and "!!" is rarely used. A slightly more reasonable argument for your case would be to cite the operators used in the lens library, but those are all aliases for regularly-named functions. There are some arguments against Haskell in terms of practicality, but this is not one of them.

coolsunglasses 12y ago
>"!!" is rarely used We just finished the lists chapter in Haskell Programming and we never even mentioned that operator. It's a silly function ^_^
jdminhbg 12y ago
> I've used it professionally, and spoken with a lot of other people who have, and exactly zero people have expressed an experience that the naming of operators has caused the language to be less practical for them. This is a pretty self-selecting set. One of the reasons I don't use Haskell professionally is that I hate its operator-naming culture, and Haskell isn't big enough in industry yet that it has lots of involuntary users (like C++ or PHP or Java does).
- nbouscal 12y ago
  As I said, you can definitely raise aesthetic objections. You're free to hate operators all you want, though it does strike me as a peculiar basis on which to decide what tool to use. My point was whether there are actual practical implications, though, and I don't think the self-selected nature of Haskell professionals has any bearing on that. I frequently hear many other objections from people working in the language, so it's not a case of rose-colored glasses in which we think everything about the language is fine. It's simply a case of operator naming not being very important, from a practical perspective. To the extent that it is important, most people who actually use the language think it's a benefit, not a detriment.
  - jdminhbg 12y ago
    Well right, but what I'm saying is that the people who actually use the language are the kind of people who like the operators. I know Latin, and a language whose functions were named in Latin would not be a practical impediment to me, but I wouldn't say that such a language would be practical in general. Haskell's operators aren't on that level, but I do think if you introduced it in a company where people were hired to write Python/Ruby/C/whatever, there'd be people who found them a practical problem.
    - nbouscal 12y ago
      Again, whether or not people like the operators is irrelevant. Aesthetic opinions about syntax don't have a material effect on productivity. As I said, there are people using the language professionally who have an aesthetic distaste for the use of operators in, e.g., the lens library (i.e. your purported selection effect is empirically false). Those people will still admit that this has little practical effect, and certainly not enough to make a language choice based on it. If there were a language written in Latin, and it was useful for some reason, people would quickly write aliases for all the Latin functions, named in English. This is very easy to do in Haskell: if your argument held, you would expect to see aliases for all of the operators. With a few exceptions (again, lens), this isn't the case. You're choosing where to live based on the color of the neighbor's bikeshed, against evidence from previous tenants that the current color is quite pleasant.
      - tormeh 12y ago
        It's not about liking, it's about looking at a piece of code and going and going "I understand all that" vs "What does all these signs and single-letter variables mean?". Naming matters.
        nbouscal 12y ago
        Yes, it's very important that people who work in the language be able to read and understand it easily. It is not, however, important that people who do not work in the language be able to do so. The most persistent critique of Haskell is that it is hard to understand for people who haven't learned it. This is as reasonable as critiquing Java because it is hard to understand for people who do not know how to program. You're welcome to claim that Haskell has a larger barrier to entry, but that is a fundamentally different claim from the claim that operators make the language harder to read for practitioners. I have been attempting to refute the latter claim, using my experience discussing the issue with said practitioners. If you want to discuss the former claim, I'm happy to do that as well, but you have to acknowledge that it is a separate claim and be clear about what it is you actually mean.

coolsunglasses 12y ago

>"!!" is rarely used We just finished the lists chapter in Haskell Programming and we never even mentioned that operator. It's a silly function ^_^

jdminhbg 12y ago

> I've used it professionally, and spoken with a lot of other people who have, and exactly zero people have expressed an experience that the naming of operators has caused the language to be less practical for them. This is a pretty self-selecting set. One of the reasons I don't use Haskell professionally is that I hate its operator-naming culture, and Haskell isn't big enough in industry yet that it has lots of involuntary users (like C++ or PHP or Java does).

nbouscal 12y ago
As I said, you can definitely raise aesthetic objections. You're free to hate operators all you want, though it does strike me as a peculiar basis on which to decide what tool to use. My point was whether there are actual practical implications, though, and I don't think the self-selected nature of Haskell professionals has any bearing on that. I frequently hear many other objections from people working in the language, so it's not a case of rose-colored glasses in which we think everything about the language is fine. It's simply a case of operator naming not being very important, from a practical perspective. To the extent that it is important, most people who actually use the language think it's a benefit, not a detriment.
- jdminhbg 12y ago
  Well right, but what I'm saying is that the people who actually use the language are the kind of people who like the operators. I know Latin, and a language whose functions were named in Latin would not be a practical impediment to me, but I wouldn't say that such a language would be practical in general. Haskell's operators aren't on that level, but I do think if you introduced it in a company where people were hired to write Python/Ruby/C/whatever, there'd be people who found them a practical problem.
  - nbouscal 12y ago
    Again, whether or not people like the operators is irrelevant. Aesthetic opinions about syntax don't have a material effect on productivity. As I said, there are people using the language professionally who have an aesthetic distaste for the use of operators in, e.g., the lens library (i.e. your purported selection effect is empirically false). Those people will still admit that this has little practical effect, and certainly not enough to make a language choice based on it. If there were a language written in Latin, and it was useful for some reason, people would quickly write aliases for all the Latin functions, named in English. This is very easy to do in Haskell: if your argument held, you would expect to see aliases for all of the operators. With a few exceptions (again, lens), this isn't the case. You're choosing where to live based on the color of the neighbor's bikeshed, against evidence from previous tenants that the current color is quite pleasant.
    - tormeh 12y ago
      It's not about liking, it's about looking at a piece of code and going and going "I understand all that" vs "What does all these signs and single-letter variables mean?". Naming matters.
      - nbouscal 12y ago
        Yes, it's very important that people who work in the language be able to read and understand it easily. It is not, however, important that people who do not work in the language be able to do so. The most persistent critique of Haskell is that it is hard to understand for people who haven't learned it. This is as reasonable as critiquing Java because it is hard to understand for people who do not know how to program. You're welcome to claim that Haskell has a larger barrier to entry, but that is a fundamentally different claim from the claim that operators make the language harder to read for practitioners. I have been attempting to refute the latter claim, using my experience discussing the issue with said practitioners. If you want to discuss the former claim, I'm happy to do that as well, but you have to acknowledge that it is a separate claim and be clear about what it is you actually mean.