[HN Gopher] Courting Haskell
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Courting Haskell
Author : honzajavorek
Score : 38 points
Date : 2020-01-14 12:47 UTC (1 days ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (honzajavorek.cz)
| ssivark wrote:
| Though I'm not much of a Haskell programmer (spent some time
| learning it and writing toy programs), I would use a different
| motto to characterize Haskell: _Stop prescribing (loose) design
| patterns; make them tight and refactor them into libraries, so
| they need only be written once._
|
| More than anything else, the language aims at providing
| modularity (and terseness, on the macro scale) for the programmer
| (while trying very hard to compile to something efficient). Even
| laziness is to enable more modularity.
|
| The "make design patterns tight" part is what ends up needing
| abstract mathematical reasoning (category theory is basically
| mathematical pattern reasoning distilled to its essence).
|
| The other consequence of abstracting patterns into libraries is
| that novice programmers end up with a lower "writing code" -vs-
| "reading+thinking" ratio compared to other languages. And this
| can be jarring to folks whose attitude is to learn by writing
| code (to discover patterns in the process).
| proc0 wrote:
| " Powerful! It takes just a few lines to implement your own clone
| of Vim:"
|
| Uh, ok lol.
|
| " If SQL or Python read like an English sentence, then Haskell
| reads like math. Feels like math. It is math. "
|
| This is basically why there's a learning curve. Any analogy used
| as a learning example will typically fall short because in order
| to fully grasp the concepts you just have to learn the math
| behind it, because that's by design (denotational semantics).
| alexashka wrote:
| Learning Haskell to write better software is like learning the
| language of the Eskimo and their elaborate vocabulary surrounding
| snow, only to realize most of the world doesn't have snow and
| that real progress is made by science, not linguistics.
| sanqui wrote:
| And wait until you discover the Eskimo languages does _not_ ,
| in fact, have hundreds of words for snow. It's a myth.
|
| http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/EskimoHoax.pdf
| alexashka wrote:
| 'elaborate vocabulary surrounding snow' != 'hundreds of words
| for snow'
| christiansakai wrote:
| This fits my experience. But then I am only an average
| engineer.
| hopia wrote:
| Ironically, Haskell pioneers exactly in programming scientific
| research while the rest of the languages focus more on the
| _linguistics_ rather than the science.
| alexashka wrote:
| Haskell is the epitome of linguistics - it took a bet on an
| arbitrary set of conditions - lazy evaluation, immutability.
|
| These linguistic choices inform the rest of the language -
| monads were only invented as an escape hatch out of the
| prison the language designers put themselves into!
|
| If you think we ought to spend some more decades researching
| how to walk using our hands instead of our feet for getting
| around and are excited about the upcoming scientific
| literature regarding hand strength exercises required and all
| the rest of it, no problem. Most everyone else is walking
| using their feet just fine - they are solving other problems,
| namely real world problems that involve walking places.
| youerbt wrote:
| Ah, the classic - "we are producing REAL software over
| here".
|
| Always reminds me of this:
| https://steenschledermann.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/no-
| tha...
| alexashka wrote:
| I'm not sure you comprehend my point - monads, lazy
| evaluation and immutability by default _are_ square
| wheels.
|
| Pointers and direct access to hardware memory _are_
| smooth wheels on top of which, all modern software
| including languages have been built.
|
| Haskell is like trying to fly by trying to imitate birds
| because it seems like a good idea. Meanwhile we have
| metal planes in the sky.
|
| It could very well turn out that Haskell is like nuclear
| fusion and C and C++ are dangerous nuclear reactors that
| sometimes cause Chernobyl. It's been 3 decades - I've
| used Haskell and I see no reason to believe that a
| complicated, hard to reason about evaluation model and
| even more complicated type systems are the way forward in
| PL design.
| hopia wrote:
| Walk all you want, meanwhile Haskell is developing ways to
| fly.
| honzajavorek wrote:
| In the past two months I've been trying to learn the Haskell
| programming language. It's vastly different from anything I know,
| so it served me also as a way how to empathize with complete
| beginners to coding. This is a diary from my journey.
| crimsonalucard wrote:
| A different way of thinking of abstraction or just a feeling of
| elegance or a feeling of power is not a sufficient explanation
| for why Haskell is so great.
|
| People want definitive and theoretically correct answers not
| talking points for a philosophical debate on programming styles.
|
| Why is typed functional programming measurably better than
| procedural? Why is it better than OOP? Definitive answers are in
| demand not exploratory experiences.
| solomonb wrote:
| Why does "Typed Functional Programming" have to be measurably
| "better" then OOP or procedural programming in order for
| Haskell to be considered a good language?
|
| All those questions at the end of your comment can be turned
| around the other way and are equally valid and unanswerable.
| avindroth wrote:
| no mention of haskellbook.com is surprising!
| olah_1 wrote:
| I read that book for 6 months straight, followed all the
| exercises, and quit when I realized I couldn't write a simple
| script that did something useful.
|
| But boy did I sure evangelize Haskell throughout the process!
| _facepalm_
| hopia wrote:
| I started building straight away from day 1, getting a decent
| REST API together is surprisingly easy. You really don't need
| to understand most of the advanced type level stuff to stay
| productive.
|
| Maybe you tried to go for too high abstraction level straight
| off the bat? That can turn out very depressing on Haskell.
| solomonb wrote:
| HPFFP was the book that finally made the language 'click' for
| me. It took 13 months to complete and only towards the very
| end did I start to get an understanding of how to structure
| an actual program larger then a leet code exercise.
|
| Its a _really_ different language from what I was used to
| (Javascript, Python, Ruby, etc). The book covered a lot of
| material that felt very basic to me, but interspersed with
| that was material that covered concepts I had never even
| considered, this was the case in the early chapters as well
| as later on.
|
| I found that the early chapters setup lots of concrete
| examples that later on would be revealed as simplified cases
| of highly abstract structures that occur all over the place.
| Uncovering these is a very magical experience. For that
| reason alone, I tell people to just grind through the book
| rather then skipping ahead to the more exciting material
| later on.
|
| But you don't have to like HPFFP or Haskell, nobody has to
| like anything. For me, Haskell is a joy to use and provides a
| seemingly never ending source of learning material to
| explore.
| ggm wrote:
| At last! somebody else who is prepared to be honest about their
| fear of maths, and mathematical notation, and people who leap
| from "its just like school maths" to referring to the
| intimidating maths you skipped or failed in school and
| university.
|
| Its just like maths: requires deep brain structure wiring you may
| not have.
| alephu5 wrote:
| I've been been learning haskell by building a standard monolithic
| web application: Postgres DB, some static content, REST API and
| firebase authentication. It's taking longer than it would with a
| familiar language but so far I'm really enjoying the experience.
| I also took a small deviation a couple of weekends ago to build a
| simple OSM router and was pleased with the ease of development
| and performance.
|
| I'd recommend the book Practical Haskell by Alejandro Serrano
| Mena to get a firm introduction to the language and ecosystem of
| web applications. After that take at look at the libraries
| developed by FP complete.
| hopia wrote:
| I'm using the same method as you. What are you using as the SQL
| and REST API libs? I'm using Servant and a library called
| Squeal for Postgres.
| Rerarom wrote:
| You keep mistyping Clojure as Closure
| cdaringe wrote:
| To the whole article I say "ditto." Great summary. Also, didn't
| Guido say he wanted to eject the functional operators in Python?
| #hearsay
| sli wrote:
| Slashdot had an interview with him where he talks about it[0],
| he basically says Python isn't the language for FP and then
| complains about readability which, YMMV on that one. I don't
| know if his opinion has changed in the last seven years,
| though.
|
| [0]:
| https://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/08/25/2115204/inter...
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