[Haskell-cafe] Investing in languages (Was: What is your favourite Haskell "aha" moment?)

[PY]

13.07.2018 02:52, Brett Gilio wrote:
> On 07/12/2018 06:46 AM, PY wrote:
>  written in Websharper and in any Haskell framework. Haskell is beauty
>> but I'm afraid its fate unfortunately will be the same as one of 
>> Common Lisp, NetBSD, etc - it's ground for ideas and experiments and 
>> has disputable design. Also it's more-more difficult to teach 
>> children to Haskell than to F#...
https://jackfoxy.github.io/DependentTypes/
https://github.com/caindy/DependentTypesProvider
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15852517

Also F# has F*  ;)

> I wonder if this is simply a result of the marketing of the language, 
> itself, rather than the strength of the language. I agree, F# has a 
> lot of beauty, but there remain many things that Haskell has a leg up 
> on that F# lacks, like dependent types
IMHO there are several reasons:

1. Haskell limits itself to lambda-only. Example, instead to add other 
abstractions and to become modern MULTI-paradigm languages, it keeps 
lambda, so record accessors leading to names collision will lead to 
adding of 1,2 extensions to the language instead to add standard syntax 
(dot, sharp, something similar). So, point #1 is limitation in 
abstraction: monads, transformers, anything - is function. It's not 
good. There were such languages already: Forth, Joy/Cat, APL/J/K... Most 
of them look dead. When you try to be elegant, your product (language) 
died. This is not my opinion, this is only my observation. People like 
diversity and variety: in food, in programming languages, in relations, 
anywhere :)

2. When language has killer app and killer framework, IMHO it has more 
chances. But if it has _killer ideas_ only... So, those ideas will be 
re-implemented in other languages and frameworks but with more simple 
and typical syntax :)  It's difficult to compete with product, 
framework, big library, but it's easy to compete with ideas. It's an 
observation too :-) You can find it in politics for example. Or in 
industry. To repeat big solution is more difficult, but we are neutrally 
to languages, language itself is not argument for me. Argument for me (I 
am usual developer) are killer apps/frameworks/libraries/ecosystem/etc. 
Currently Haskell has stack only - it's very good, but most languages 
has similar tools (not all have LTS analogue, but big frameworks are the 
same).
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