Hacker News Reader

Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn’t think so. Maybe Clojure?

I kind of like Haskell but I’ve been turned off by the way some of the development is done.

There is, for all intents and purposes, only GHC. Yet everyone uses it by tuning on all sorts of special options to make it more usable. Why are they options? To remain ‘compatible’ with the ‘other Haskell compilers’ that basically no one seems to use.

It’s like if JS all defaulted to 1.0 and you had to pile on options to use any features after 1998.

It just makes things much more confusing and odd than necessary. To support something it seems like no one uses.

It will also be easier once the whole applicable/monad thing is done.

View on HN

Clojure's focus, after simplicity, is functional programming.

Haskell's focus is as an experimental vehicle for type system theory. If you want to teach type system and category theory, use Haskell.

Functional programming does not require Hindley-Milner type inference, and that happens to be one of the larger cognitive hurdles in Haskell. Algorithm W is a layer on top of the Lambda Calculus, not something essential for understanding it.

+1 for using Clojure to teach Lambda Calculus^h^h^h functional programming.

Just because there are some folks that use Haskell for for experimental studies, doesn't mean that Haskell is not a great language for line-of-business programming.

I can't say it better than Gabriel Gonzalez:

"Haskell is unbelievably awesome for maintaining large projects. There's nothing that I can say that will fully convey how nice it is to modify existing Haskell code. You can only appreciate this through experience.

When I say that Haskell is easy to maintain, I mean that you can easily approach a large Haskell code base written by somebody else and make sweeping architectural changes to the project without breaking the code."

I think many of those special options will eventually become defaults once the Haskell 2020 standard comes out, which was started last year: https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-prime/2016-April/...

You can follow along here: https://github.com/haskell/rfcs/pulls?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Apr

GHC is definitely the only widely used compiler, but there is at least one other significant one I know of: https://github.com/IntelLabs/flrc

But you describe exactly how I as a haskell programmer experience JS. I need 6 babel plugins and and a build tool to my ES6 to work...

Honestly I don’t do modern JS so I don’t know how much of a mess it is (or isn’t). NPM’s existence makes me lean heavily in one direction.

I only use JS on the front end for website interactivity and that doesn’t tend to be very fancy.

There is an effort to update the standard with the language extensions https://prime.haskell.org/

It's partially that. But the extension system is also there because it's a super light process to get them accepted, and the development community is voting in a way about what extensions are worth adding to the languages, and what can be left to spoil and die.

I get that. It just seems like every developer has a list of 15-20. They’re often different but the core few is ALWAYS there.

Every Haskell book I’ve seen (even those many years old) includes bits about how you should basically always have X, Y, and Z on and you don’t want to bother developing without them.

Seems like those should have become default long ago.

I get why some of that stuff exists in C/C++ land where people use GCC, MSVC, and LLVM among others.

But Haskell is practically a monoculture.

Good to see from sibling comments this is being addressed in the next standard.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com