[Haskell-beginners] bugs or lack thereof

[Brent Yorgey]

On Sun, Aug 21, 2011 at 04:53:43PM -0700, Dennis Raddle wrote:
> I love Haskell for the fact that my programs have relatively few bugs
> other than typos or obvious mistakes in types that the compiler
> catches. I just wrote about 100 lines of code to do a fairly complex
> task, which is to make a map of changing loudness in a musical
> document (including slopes, not just flat level changes) and after I
> got the typos out and it compiled, it just worked.
> 
> I have been a professional programmer in imperative languages for 20
> years, so I can think pretty accurately about what I am doing, but I'm
> new to Haskell, and it's a marked difference in the ease of getting
> something to work right.

This has been my experience too.  Haskell is not magic, but it does
help eliminate a large class of silly mistakes: the kind of mistakes
that everyone makes no matter how experienced.  So it frees you up to
only make more interesting mistakes; and if you are an experienced
programmer you don't make as many of those.  So you often get programs
that work the first time, which is (as you know!) a singularly
unsettling and heady experience.

-Brent