A Haskell Lover's Plea | Hacker News Reader

A Haskell Lover's Plea

cse.unsw.edu.au

20 pointse192930017 comments

That's from a course that was given in 2004. UNSW has been teaching haskell for much longer, in those days everybody doing CS had to learn haskell.

Still a dearth of useful programs written in haskell in 2016. I've never seen a Haskell lover attempt an explanation that wasn't pure booster-ism. Why are there so few useful Haskell programs? Haskell has had time and access to programming talent and come up with very little. Maybe it's just around the corner hanging out with the year of the linux desktop?

I'll hazard a guess.

(1) Haskell was born of academic research and has kept that affinity ("monads"...).

(2) Haskell originated at Microsoft but was never pushed. Java, C#, Rust, Go, and JavaScript were backed and pushed hard by big players.

(3) Performance sensitive programs (grep, Nginx, git) are written in C. Ugly as sin, but closely matches the machine, and is hand-tunable. Non-performance sensitive programs can be written in scripting languages.

(4) It's not OOP, so it missed out on that craze. OO languages have since adopted functional constructs and kept their historical user bases.

(5) It's daunting. The compiler plugins, the gyrations to avoid mutation and I/O, and the many levels of abstraction can make it difficult to start. IMO worth it, but still daunting. Most amateur artists don't use marble.

(6) There are lots of crap C projects, and mountains of crap JS projects. The jewels are the few that turned out to be important and useful. Haskell being less popular means fewer shining examples.

See also, "Worse is better" https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html

> Why are there so few useful Haskell programs?

How do you know how many useful Haskell programs there are? Did you count them all? How many have I written?

I estimated. Pick say the debian reository, and count them there. Pick all of the programs written in Haskell where somebody as pointed you to them and said "this is cool and solves a problem you might have" where that proglem is something more than writing a haskell program.

I'm not omniscient, funnily enough. But hey, let's ask. How many programs have you written in haskell that you've published and have more than say 10,000 users?

> Still a dearth of useful programs written in haskell in 2016

Especially now since Wagon has been acquired!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12401726#12402479

pandoc is a very useful haskell program.

I thought the link was going to be Is Anything Being Done to Remedy the Soul Crushing Compile Times of GHC.

https://m.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/45q90s/is_anything_b...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com