Hacker News Reader

Haskell is not a real dependently type language. It may tries to quack like one, but compared to Idris/Agda, it's doing a very bad job at it.

I'm pretty sure Parent didn't included Haskell.

View on HN

Haskell has decent experimental support for dependent types. I've been using the CLaSH Haskell to hardware conversion system, which makes heavy use of type level arithmetic, with pretty good results.

Type level arithmetic is sugar for clever GADTs, not full blown dependent types. Try to do things in Agda/Idris and come back to haskell, the expressiveness is not nearly comparable.

Are Nats in agda and idris not also just GADT based peano numbers?

The toyish version showed in tutorials, yes. The real stuff, no, it's just .. integers.

And anyway, my point was that you can do much much more than type level arithmetic.

His comparison sounded much more like "research languages vs. mainstream imperative languages" and Haskell definitely came from research land, just as Idris and Agda are.

Plus someone is seriously working on dependent types in Haskell - so no, I think it's fitting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com