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

Vanessa McHale vanessa.mchale at iohk.io
Fri Jul 13 13:19:26 UTC 2018


The idea that Haskell is in the same category as Forth or APL is
completely wrong and the idea that Haskell only has stack for tooling is
just plain wrong. Haskell already has libraries that are superior to
anything else available for certain use cases.

The idea that abstraction occurs only over functions is false. As of GHC
8.2.2, one can abstract over modules as well. Adding special syntax for
record accesses would be inadvisable when principled approaches such as
row polymorphism exist.

On 07/13/2018 02:38 AM, PY wrote:
> 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).
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
> To (un)subscribe, modify options or view archives go to:
> http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
> Only members subscribed via the mailman list are allowed to post.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20180713/ca67e1d4/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 488 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20180713/ca67e1d4/attachment.sig>


More information about the Haskell-Cafe mailing list