[Haskell-cafe] What is your favourite Haskell "aha" moment?

[PY]

13.07.2018 09:47, Joachim Durchholz wrote:
> Am 13.07.2018 um 01:40 schrieb Tony Morris:
>> On python, we are fixing it (WIP):
>> https://github.com/qfpl/hpython
>
> Some poisonous aspects of Python are unfixable.
> E.g. having declarations as program-visible update to a global state 
> causes all kinds of unnecessary pain, such as having to deal with 
> half-initialized peer modules during module initialization.
>
I never understand that point. Mostly Python programs have not global 
state, only global constants. You can have "application" monad in 
Haskell (read), the same in Python: most Python programmers create some 
Application class. Also OOP has long been solved "global state" problem, 
for example, Smalltalk (similar idea you can find in Erlang): state is 
hidden behind some FSM which is represented as class (process in 
Erlang). You can not change state anywhere, you can only send message. 
FSM guards you from any errors. Even more, FSM-style is super safe and 
robust: you can visualize its behavior, to develop it very quickly, to 
debug it easy, final code usually does not contain errors even...

Even I can imagine read monad with big record inside with a lot of 
fields, flags, etc and to get absolutely the same spaghetti code with 
flags manipulation and testing in Haskell, but under monad ;)

>> Did you see the recent "default mutable arguments" post?
>> https://lethain.com/digg-v4/
>
> Yeah, the "default parameter is an empty list but that's then going to 
> be updated across invocations" classic.
> Other languages have made the same mistake. Default data needs to be 
> either immutable or recreated on each call.
> Such mistakes can be mitigated, but they cannot be fixed while staying 
> backwards-compatible.
>
> Python actually did an incompatible switch from 2 to 3, but for some 
> reason Guido didn't fix the above two, or some other things (such as 
> Python's broken idea of multiple inheritance, or the horribly 
> overcomplicated way annotations work).
> Python is nice for small tasks. If you accept its invitation to extend 
> it you get fragility (due to the inability to define hard constraints 
> so whatever you extend will violate *somebody's* assumptions), and if 
> you scale to large systems you get fragility as well (because Python 
> modularization is too weak).
>


Interesting here is that there are a big enterprise products written in 
Python and they are very useful: 
https://www.codeinstitute.net/blog/7-popular-software-programs-written-in-python/



> Well, enough of the off-topic thing here.
>
>> On 07/12/2018 07:58 PM, Brett Gilio wrote:
>>> Python is poison, indeed. ;)
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