WingNews logo WingNews
top | item 4154490

(no title)

supersillyus | 13 years ago

My "ah ha" moment with Haskell was after a few years of using it quite regularly, I realized that it wasn't actually making me more productive in the kind of code I actually write from day-to-day. It's a lovely language and I wouldn't discourage anyone from using it, but for my purposes I realized it was more exciting than useful at some point, and after that I haven't been back to it as much.

discuss

order

CoffeeDregs|13 years ago

Agreed. It's so beautiful, but so constraining. I'm a much better developer for having used it, but returned to Python/Ruby/Java[for-speed] after spending lots of time with Haskell.

That said, I desperately miss static-typing and Hindley-Milner type inference... I keep searching for the perfect language.

srean|13 years ago

Then I would be interested about your opinion on OcaML/MLTon, F# and Scala. To me they seem like a good balance. If you are more adventurous then try Felix.

EDIT: apparently someone did not like your comment. Some downvotes confound me.

pka|13 years ago

Could you give a concrete example that shows why Haskell is constraining?

masklinn|13 years ago

> I realized that it wasn't actually making me more productive in the kind of code I actually write from day-to-day

I've got a quip for that in my quotefile:

> "Haskell mainly helps with my C++ template coding when I'm doing money oriented programming" -- fnord123

jerf|13 years ago

I've noticed that slowly, but surely, Haskell really is winning. C++ is now basically running as fast as it can to become Haskell. It's such an old language with so much baggage that "as fast as it can" isn't very fast at all, and it has no chance of ever reaching it, but the trendline is clear.

The question the programming community faces over the next, oh, ten years or so, is "Can we get the benefits of Haskell without the strict attention to the type system and without having to rigidly separate IO?" Or a bit more sarcastically/cynically, can we get the benefits without having to fundamentally change how we do business? My gut says no, but I'm open to being proved wrong. (Oh, and yeah that's not the only question, there's others like "What about OO? Can we keep it?", but I think that's really the core question; do we really have to rigidly control our side effects or can we keep our sloppy side-effect usage? Everything else is either incidental next to that, or flows from it.)

slewis|13 years ago

What's your go to language now?