4 ms·

> And yet 100% of production software in the world, including avionics, medical devices and the like is written in imperative languages Huh? > But if you want

by tome 11y ago

> And yet 100% of production software in the world, including avionics, medical devices and the like is written in imperative languages Huh? > But if you want to be honest, you must admit that PFP isn't used anywhere Eh? > Unfortunately, no one has ever used PFP to write any large software other than compilers Whatnow? Are you exaggerating for rhetorical effect, or do you really believe that?

pron 11y ago
Sorry, I meant 99.999% and rounded up. As to the compiler thing -- that is the sad reality. In its 20 years of existence, the largest Haskell program ever written is the Haskell compiler itself. The largest company codebase is only a few million lines of code, and it is comprised of many programs, including a modified Haskell compiler (which, I am willing to bet, is their biggest program). Just for comparison, a medium-sized company codebase is around 50 MLOC. More production code is being produced in 2015 in Delphi, COBOL and Fortran than in Haskell. This is my biggest problem with PFP: all discussions about its effectiveness are completely theoretical. Calling pertinent evidence "anecdotal" is an insult to anecdotal evidence. There are between 0 and 2 (much closer to 0) data points of large, complex, long-maintained Haskell programs outside the compiler itself (out of thousands of such projects that are started each year). I honestly don't know how effective PFP is, but we can be certain of one thing -- no one else does either[1]. Maybe it's the next big thing as everyone has been saying for twenty years (I remember around that time the talk at my University about how Haskell was about to take over the world) and maybe it's a total dud. Nobody has a clue (and that you've managed to write your API endpoint in two hours instead of two months or whatever isn't evidence of anything; evidence would be writing an air-traffic control system in one year instead of five, and maintaining it for a few years with a changing team of 3 instead of ten). [1]: I remember that for a good few years most of the industry thought C++ is the best thing that had ever happened to it -- until projects started requiring maintenance. I do not for one second think Haskell is like C++, but vast, undeniably pertinent evidence was proven completely misleading because it wasn't longitudinal enough, let alone, shallow, scattered evidence, which is borderline relevant.

by tome 11y ago

pron 11y ago

Sorry, I meant 99.999% and rounded up. As to the compiler thing -- that is the sad reality. In its 20 years of existence, the largest Haskell program ever written is the Haskell compiler itself. The largest company codebase is only a few million lines of code, and it is comprised of many programs, including a modified Haskell compiler (which, I am willing to bet, is their biggest program). Just for comparison, a medium-sized company codebase is around 50 MLOC. More production code is being produced in 2015 in Delphi, COBOL and Fortran than in Haskell. This is my biggest problem with PFP: all discussions about its effectiveness are completely theoretical. Calling pertinent evidence "anecdotal" is an insult to anecdotal evidence. There are between 0 and 2 (much closer to 0) data points of large, complex, long-maintained Haskell programs outside the compiler itself (out of thousands of such projects that are started each year). I honestly don't know how effective PFP is, but we can be certain of one thing -- no one else does either[1]. Maybe it's the next big thing as everyone has been saying for twenty years (I remember around that time the talk at my University about how Haskell was about to take over the world) and maybe it's a total dud. Nobody has a clue (and that you've managed to write your API endpoint in two hours instead of two months or whatever isn't evidence of anything; evidence would be writing an air-traffic control system in one year instead of five, and maintaining it for a few years with a changing team of 3 instead of ten). [1]: I remember that for a good few years most of the industry thought C++ is the best thing that had ever happened to it -- until projects started requiring maintenance. I do not for one second think Haskell is like C++, but vast, undeniably pertinent evidence was proven completely misleading because it wasn't longitudinal enough, let alone, shallow, scattered evidence, which is borderline relevant.