Hacker News Reader

Comment by zelcon5 | Hacker News Reader

An ad-hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Haskell

Please don't post snarky dismissals of new work to HN. Substantive criticism is fine.

How is this _not_ exactly what I said it was though? The author even says in the readme that it's a NIH version of Haskell.

I love PL mental masturbation as much as anyone else, but stuff like this is equivalent to an oil spill in a freshwater lake with 20 endangered species.

The problem is the genre of the snarky dismissal. Perhaps there was a solid point behind what you said, but you didn't express it that way.

It's a tragedy of the commons. Posting such coments never feels harmful, but once they get above a certain level the whole community becomes filled with toxic fumes. This threshold is lower than it seems—the damage isn't only in the fumes your comment gives off, but in the encouragement it gives others to do the same.

Tragedy of the commons plus broken windows theory is not an auspicious combination, so we try to be proactive about asking people not to do this.

Brief, critical, and decisively vague critique of new technology.

Not that I disagree, but I feel the HN comment section has become very predictable.

I usually come here to defend the language designer, but I think this particular submission is worthy of brief, critical and vague criticism because there's not a lot to criticize.

The user guide and language reference is very thin and it's missing the two critically distinctive features of Go, namely goroutines and channels.

It's a nice idea, but there's not a lot here to talk about.

Half of Haskell is a lot!

So any new functional language with static types is now a bug-ridden, half implementation of Haskell? Wow, that's arrogance. Haskell was one of this language's three named influences (along with Lisp and Go).

Anyway, very cool project. I look forward to trying it out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun's_tenth_rule

Edit: I'm assuming he's joking

Yeah, I'm aware of what's he's riffing off (note that Greenspun's had nothing to do with Haskell). It's still an annoying attitude to have toward any new functional language that happens to share a syntax with Haskell.

Is that the gp's attitude toward PureScript, for example? Or Idris?

If that's the case, it must be nice/"interesting"/boring having found a "forever language". Look forward to seeing how that's going for him in 2030.

An important difference: it did not self-germinate, it is a fruit of a conscious effort.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com