[Haskell-beginners] do Haskell programs have fewer bugs?

[Dan Krol]

Perhaps a bit tangential to the general question of "fewer bugs", but I'll
tell you that Haskell really clicked for me when I made a very nuanced
refactor of code that, while it took me a half day to sort out the type
errors, worked perfectly the first time I ran it. And this was for audio
generation stuff, something that's rather hard to debug in a usual way, so
I'm grateful that I didn't have to. There's no way it would work so
smoothly in, say, C++. Granted, I threw a whole lot of types at it, because
I was working with transformations between and operations within different
sorts of domains that I didn't want to get mixed up. So, you sometimes have
to deliberately leverage the tools to get it to do the magic for you.


On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 11:47 AM, Kyle Murphy <orclev at gmail.com> wrote:

> From my experience so far it's largely the same, but you start to try to
> take advantage of some of the more advanced types to handle of lot of the
> plumbing type tasks. Things like Applicative and Monad make it simpler to
> shuffle data and context between (or around) functions. In general picking
> the right abstraction over your data goes a long way towards making your
> code easier to work with and more succinct. Aside from that it's really
> much like the case with individual functions, it's about composing larger
> operations from smaller ones until eventually you reach the program level
> where you're composing a handful of very coarse functions that comprise the
> totality of the program.
>
> -R. Kyle Murphy
> --
> Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 2:21 PM, Nadir Sampaoli <nadirsampaoli at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> Il 19/mar/2014 18:09 "Dennis Raddle" <dennis.raddle at gmail.com> ha
>> scritto:
>>
>> >
>> > I was thinking about why it seems I can write Haskell code without bugs
>> in a much easier way than imperative languages. Part of it is the strict
>> type-checking, but I think there is something more.
>>
>> As a beginner I find that the type system is my best friend. I spend most
>> of the time in the repl trying function compositions until GHCi likes them.
>> At that point, like I often read from expert haskellers' conversations, "if
>> it typechecks it's most likely correct".
>>
>> >
>> > It's the potential for conciseness. I work hard when programming in
>> Haskell to take advantage of language features that make my program concise.
>>
>> As the saying goes, less code means less potential for bugs :)
>>
>> >
>> > Somehow this leads me to think about it in a certain way. I know I'm on
>> track as it gets smaller and smaller. And as it gets smaller, it leads me
>> to think about my logic's cases and things like that. Certain patterns show
>> up and I think about what those patterns mean for the structure of my
>> problem.
>> >
>> > By the time I'm done with all that, I've analyzed my problem much more
>> thoroughly than I would ever do in an imperative language.
>> >
>> > Dennis
>> >
>>
>> As someone who is still struggling to get past that learning phase where
>> you only solve "simple" (usually one-liner) exercises, I'd like to ask you
>> (and anyone reading this) how do you reason at a larger level?
>> At the function level Haskell feels like piping shell commands (which I
>> find nice): a chain of successive transformations.
>> How do you work at a larger (module/project) level? Do you need to have
>> mastered all the main monads (beyond list amd maybe) and monad transformers?
>>
>> Sorry for the long rant. And thanks for the interesting discussion.
>>
>> --
>> Nadir
>>
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>
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