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Fashion? Haskell's core abstractions are not design patterns du jour. They're math. They're not going away. The fashionistas are the programmers who want to pi

by pash 11y ago

Fashion? Haskell's core abstractions are not design patterns du jour. They're math. They're not going away. The fashionistas are the programmers who want to pick up a bit of Haskell to impress their colleagues but don't want to learn the abstractions that make it a languange worth learning in the first place. They're the people who read about it on Hacker News and decide it's worth a few hours—enough that they can slap it on their résumé and garner a few more calls from recruiters—but no more. They're the people who insist there's something wrong with your code if a Javascript programmer can't immediately comprehend what's going on, and who can't be bothered to learn how and why to use applicatives. Despite its minor vogue, Haskell as a language is, by its nature, about as far from fashionable as you can get. And, yes, that's true in part because it takes a lot of time and effort to learn it to a productive level. Haskell has never claimed Java's selling points. There's a lot to learn. But it rewards the effort you put in, eventually.

foldr 11y ago
>Fashion? Haskell's core abstractions are not design patterns du jour. They're math. They're not going away. That doesn't really make any sense. Just because the abstractions have some kind of Platonic existence doesn't mean that people are going to keep using them. Significant use of applicatives in day-to-day code is a relatively new development in the Haskell community. I used to write a fair bit of Haskell code around five or six years ago (well beyond basic Haskell 98), but the operators in that code were not familiar to me. (They may have been once, but I clearly didn't come across them often enough to remember them.) It's easy enough to understand the code once you look up the operators, but Haskell does seem to be gradually collecting a lot of abstractive cruft. There's something to be said for deploying the fancier abstractions when they significantly reduce code size, rather than whenever you possibly can.
- pash 11y ago
  Yes, applicative code is a relatively new development in Haskell: applicative functors were discovered only in 2008.

by pash 11y ago

foldr 11y ago

>Fashion? Haskell's core abstractions are not design patterns du jour. They're math. They're not going away. That doesn't really make any sense. Just because the abstractions have some kind of Platonic existence doesn't mean that people are going to keep using them. Significant use of applicatives in day-to-day code is a relatively new development in the Haskell community. I used to write a fair bit of Haskell code around five or six years ago (well beyond basic Haskell 98), but the operators in that code were not familiar to me. (They may have been once, but I clearly didn't come across them often enough to remember them.) It's easy enough to understand the code once you look up the operators, but Haskell does seem to be gradually collecting a lot of abstractive cruft. There's something to be said for deploying the fancier abstractions when they significantly reduce code size, rather than whenever you possibly can.

pash 11y ago
Yes, applicative code is a relatively new development in Haskell: applicative functors were discovered only in 2008.