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

[Paul]

I understand that my points are disputable, sure, example, multi-pardigm Oz – dead 😊 Any rule has exceptions. But my point was that people don’t like elegant and one-abstraction languages. It’s my observation. For me, Smalltalk was good language (mostly dead, except Pharo, which looks cool). Forth – high-level “stack-around-assembler”, mostly dead (Factor looks abandoned, only 8th looks super cool, but it’s not free). What else? Lisp? OK, there are SBCL, Clojure, Racket... But you don’t find even Clojure in languages trends usually. APL, J – super cool! Seems dead (I don’t know what happens with K). ML, SML? By the way, Haskell role was to kill SML community, sure it is sad to acknowledge it, but it’s 100% true...

Haskell try to be minimalistic and IMHO this can lead to death. Joachim, I’m not talking “it’s good/it’s bad”, “multiparadigm is good” or else... I don’t know what is right. It’s my observations only. Looks like it can happen.

If we will look to Haskell history then we see strange curve. I’ll try to describe it with humour, so, please, don;t take it seriously 😊 
- Let’s be pure lambda fanatics!
- Is it possible to create a big application?
- Is it possible to compile and optimize it?!
- Let’s try...
- Wow, it’s possible!!! (sure, it’s possible, Lisp did it long-long ago).
- Looks like puzzle, can be used to write a lot of articles (there were articles about combinators, Jay/Cat/Scheme, etc, now there are a lot of Haskell articles – big interesting in academia. But IMHO academia interest to language can kill it too: Clean, Strongtalk, etc)
- Stop! How to do I/O? Real programming?!!
- Ohh, if we will wrap it in lambda and defer it to top level (main::IO ()), it will have I/O type (wrapper is hidden in type)
- Let’s call it... Monad!!
- Wow, cool! Works! Anybody should use monads! Does not your language have monads? Then we fly to you! (everybody forgot that monads are workaround of Haskell limitation and are not needed in another languages. Also they lead to low-performance code)
- But how to compose them???!?!
- We will wrap/unwrap, wrap/unwrap.. Let’s call it... transformers!!! “Monad transformers” – sounds super cool. Your language does not have “lift” operation, right? Ugh...
- How to access records fields... How... That’s a question. ‘.’ - no! ‘#’ - no! Eureka! We will add several language extensions and voila!
- To be continued... 😊

I love Haskell but I think such curve is absolutely impossible in commercial language. With IT managers 😊 To solve problem in a way when solution leads to another problem which needs new solution again and reason is only to keep lambda-abstraction-only (OK, Vanessa, backpacks also 😉) Can you imagine that all cars will have red color? Or any food will be sweet? It’s not technical question, but psychological and linguistic. Why native languages are not so limited? They even borrow words and forms from another one 😊 

Haskell’s core team knows how better then me, and I respect a lot of Haskell users, most of them helped me A LOT (!!!). It’s not opinion even, because I don’t know what is a right way. Let’s call it observation and feeling of the future.

I feel: Haskell has 3 cases: 1) to die 2) to change itself 3) to fork to another language
How I see commercial successful Haskell-like language:
- No monads, no transformers
- There are dependent types, linear types
- There are other evaluation models/abstractions (not only lambda)
- Special syntax for records fields, etc
- Less operators noise, language extensions (but it’s very disputable)
- Solve problems with numerous from/to conversions (strings, etc)
- Solve problems with libraries

Last point needs explanation:
- There is a lot of libraries written to check some type concepts only, no any business value. Also there are a lot of libraries written by students while they are learning Haskell: mostly without any business value/abandoned
- There is situation when you have alternative libraries in one project due to dependencies (but should be one only, not both!)
- Strange dependencies: I have installed Agda even! Why???!

IMHO problems with libraries and lambda-only-abstraction lead to super slow compilation, big and complex compiler.
So, currently I see (again, it’s my observation only) 2 big “camps”:
1. Academia, which has own interests, for example, to keep Haskell minimalistic (one-only-abstraction). Trade-off only was to add language extensions but they fragmentizes the language
2. Practical programmers, which interests are different from 1st “camp”

Another my observation is: a lot of peoples tried Haskell and switched to another languages (C#, F#, etc) because they cannot use it for big enterprise projects (Haskell becomes hobby for small experiments or is dropped off).

Joachim, I’m absolutely agreed that a big company can solve a lot of these problems. But some of them have already own languages (you can compare measure units in Haskell and in F#, what looks better...).

When I said about killer app, I mean: devs like Ruby not due to syntax but RoR. The same Python: sure, Python syntax is very good, but without Zope, Django, TurboGears, SQLAlchemy, Twisted, Tornado, Cheetah, Jinja, etc – nobody will use Python. Sure, there are exceptions: Delphi, CBuilder, for example. But this is bad karma of Borland 😊 They had a lot of compilers (pascal, prolog, c/c++, etc), but... On the other hand after reincarnation we have C# 😊  Actually all these are only observations: nobody knows the future.


/Best regards, Paul

From: Joachim Durchholz
Sent: 13 июля 2018 г. 21:49
To: haskell-cafe at haskell.org
Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] Investing in languages (Was: What is yourfavourite Haskell "aha" moment?)

Am 13.07.2018 um 09:38 schrieb PY:
> 1. Haskell limits itself to lambda-only. Example, instead to add other 
> abstractions and to become modern MULTI-paradigm languages,

"modern"?
That's not an interesting property.
"maintainable", "expressive" - THESE are interesting. Multi-paradigm can 
help, but if overdone can hinder it - the earliest multi-paradigm 
language I'm aware of was PL/I, and that was a royal mess I hear.

> So, point #1 is limitation in 
> abstraction: monads, transformers, anything - is function. It's not 
> good.

Actually limiting yourself to a single abstraciton tool can be good. 
This simplifies semantics and makes it easier to build stuff on top of it.

Not that I'm saying that this is necessarily the best thing.

> There were such languages already: Forth, Joy/Cat, APL/J/K... Most of
> them look dead.
Which proves nothing, because many multi-paradigm languages look dead, too.

> When you try to be elegant, your product (language) died.
Proven by Lisp... er, disproven.

> This is not my opinion, this is only my observation. People like 
> diversity and variety: in food, in programming languages, in relations, 
> anywhere :)

Not in programming languages.
Actually multi-paradigm is usually a bad idea. It needs to be done in an 
excellent fashion to create something even remotely usable, while a 
single-paradigm language is much easier to do well.
And in practice, bad language design has much nastier consequences than 
leaving out some desirable feature.

> 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 :)

"Typical" is in the eye of the beholder, so that's another non-argument.

> It's difficult to compete with product, 
> framework, big library, but it's easy to compete with ideas. It's an 
> observation too :-)

Sure, but Haskell has product, framework, big library.
What's missing is commitment by a big company, that's all. Imagine 
Google adopting Haskell, committing to building libraries and looking 
for Haskell programmers in the streets - all of a sudden, Haskell is 
going to be the talk of the day. (Replace "Google" with whatever 
big-name company with deep pockets: Facebook, MS, IBM, you name it.)

> language itself is not argument for me.

You are arguing an awful lot about missing language features 
("multi-paradigm") to credibly make that statement.

> 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).

Yeah, a good library ecosystem is very important, and from the reports I 
see on this list it's not really good enough.
The other issue is that Haskell's extensions make it more difficult to 
have library code interoperate. Though that's a trade-off: The freedom 
to add language features vs. full interoperability. Java opted for the 
other opposite: 100% code interoperability at the cost of a really 
annoying language evolution process, and that gave it a huge library 
ecosystem.

But... I'm not going to make the Haskell developers' decisions. If they 
don't feel comfortable with reversing the whole culture and make 
interoperability trump everything else, then I'm not going to blame 
them. I'm not even going to predict anything about Haskell's future, 
because my glass orb is out for repairs and I cannot currently predict 
the future.

Regards,
Jo
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