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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

>the older FP guys have spent the last like 20-30 years going "yo this is dope you guys should really be doing this" and getting largely ignored

I've not been ignoring them. I tried at least three different Haskell tutorials and articles explaining how cool it is. The problem was the author would show some code sand say 'see how easy it is to do this, and this, and this!', but I'd look at the code and have no idea whatever what it was doing or how it was doing it, and the guide/tutorial wouldn't tell me. After a few tries, I just gave up.

Maybe there's a canonical newbie's tutorial that takes you through the shift from imperative/procedural thinking?

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Heh, very often their problem domain is also an issue.

"We're going to write a compiler in our shiny FP language".

"We're going to implement a Fourier transform".

Nah, thanks, could you show me instead how I can get the Employee record from an XML file, stick it in a PostgreSQL database and also send it down the wire through a REST API as JSON?

Haskell code for that looks quite nice as well - however, it's less about a language per se but rather about availability of libraries and how mature / well-built their API is.

For quite a few FP languages the ecosystem is there and you can do all these problem domains nicely, they just tend to be skipped in tutorials as they rely on non-core third party libraries (sometimes with multiple nice but very different alternatives). Perhaps a "batteries-included" stance of Ruby(+Rails) and Python would simplify that, but it's more of a political issue.

> It's less about a language per se but rather about availability of libraries and how mature / well-built their API is.

In the real world, those matter just as much as the language. They usually matter even more :)

Look at what Rust is doing - I think at least half of their effort is spent towards building up a large collection of high quality, well maintained (i.e. feature requests implemented, bugs fixed quickly) and well documented libraries.

I agree. For me what matters most is language implementation (compiler/VM quality, GC quality, etc) and important libraries (and whether they are good). Language itself is not very important. I can write boilerplate, but I can't write GC implementation. So while I don't like Go language, for example, its implementation is very good and I can live with it.

> Haskell code for that looks quite nice as well - however, it's less about a language per se but rather about availability of libraries and how mature / well-built their API is.

That might be the case, but you simply never see tutorials for writing a CRUD-like web application in Haskell. Maybe they exist, but they don't seem to show up very often here or on reddit or whatever.

https://www.yesodweb.com/book

http://haskell-servant.readthedocs.io/en/stable/tutorial/

http://happstack.com/docs/crashcourse/index.html

you forgot the "oh and requirements will change randomly as you're getting employee record from xml file to etc etc

In my experience, that's really not an argument against Haskell. I find it easier to make large changes in my representation of the world in Haskell than in any other language I've worked in.

As much as I love haskell and want to say I've had those same experiences, that hasn't been my experience. Haskell forces me to write better code so often that it's painful when bad code will do just as fine.

I'm always surprised how often bad code is the solution too.. And when I say the solution, I mean to all the points along the path that I may take to get to the final destination. And I'm not saying this because you can't write this type of code in haskell but because haskell makes it more difficult and that's not always a good thing

Well, despite what we tell ourselves, I think that most code we write is actually short lived. As in, it is only used for a short time. It might be in a zombie state for many years and even be revived, if it's an Open Source project, but that's not the common scenario.

As a result, if most of the code written by most programmers is short lived and during that short life changes drastically, super-strict languages actually slow you down a lot.

The real problem is: sometimes certain parts of our code live very long and intense lives. But we never know which parts and at which moments. If we knew, we'd just write those parts in Rust/Haskell and the rest in Javascript or Visual Basic and live merrily ever after.

To paraphrase P.T. Barnum: I know that 10% of my code needs to be extremely fast, easy to refactor and readable, I just don't know which 10% :D

I agree with most of that, but I find that when my code is changing drastically is when I get the most help from my type checking, and find it most conspicuously absent when I use "less strict" languages.

I've no doubt this depends on context, on habits and approach, on skill with the languages in question, and on skill with effectively using static typing in general, so I'm not surprised that others' experiences differ.

well said thanks! probably what i might have said if i had more eloquent wording :D

> The problem was the author would show some code sand say 'see how easy it is to do this, and this, and this!', but I'd look at the code and have no idea whatever what it was doing or how it was doing it, and the guide/tutorial wouldn't tell me. After a few tries, I just gave up.

You're better off learning OCaml or F# for a small project or two, honestly. The jump from pure procedural to pure functional is big enough without also dragging in laziness, type classes, and monads.

+1 F#, really nice language

FWIW, I came to Haskell by way of OCaml, and it seems to have gone well.

What's worked for me is using Scala on real production projects and just taking it slow. First year or two I was writing Scala that looked like Java, last year or two I've been writing Scala that looks like Haskell, but because the language supports both styles I was able to learn one piece at a time and stay productive the whole time.

I don't think 'three haskell tutorials' is ever enough to teach you a completely new programming language/paradigm. You wouldn't learn C in 'three C tutorials' either, would you?

Perhaps a Haskell book with a project or two would be a better alternative?

No, but if well done, it could be enough for me to say, "I get why this is worth pursuing further." I've had the same experience as the person above: Haskell tutorials seem to say, "Look what I can do!" and not, "See how you can do this?"

Well, after a few tutorials you should have noticed that it's a high-level language with clean syntax and a compiler that produces relatively fast binaries. That's a start. What else were you expecting?

Something that shows me how this is worth spending the time learning, when I could just as easily use another high-level language with clean syntax and a compiler that produces relatively fast binaries - but that are not functional - minus the learning curve.

Well shit. I guess teaching languages designed by academicians aren't for you. Same goes for blog posts written by random amateurs on the internet. A whole three tutorials, too! You should ask for a refund.

I didn’t expect to ‘learn Haskell’, but learning anything at all about how the actual code being presented worked would have been nice.

I find OCaml is a much more accessible language for getting your head around functional paradigms.

I'm following along with Learn You A Haskell[0] and it's the only Haskell tutorial I've found that's enjoyable to read and is super easy to follow and understand. I definitely recommend it.

[0]: http://learnyouahaskell.com/

Yes, agreed.

There's the shift to functional thinking, which should not be underestimated. Next up is learning the target language syntax. Then there is the issue of gaining familiarity with the tools & libraries available.

Currently just started myself on http://haskellbook.com/, their philosophy seems to be just something for you, teaching functional programming with haskell from well defined fundamentals to make sure everything clicks. If they deliver on the promise I am yet to find out!

The erlang tutorial is pretty effective at that, IMO. The biggest problem with it is that erlang syntax is so foreign to most programmers you're going to spend enough mental effort understanding that to detract from the brainpower available for understanding the functional paradigms.

I found the opposite to be true. It's so 'foreign' that it avoids me falling into "I already know what this does" traps. Except for 'if'. Avoid 'if'.

Isn't that why Elixir came about, to be Erlang with a less esoteric interface?

Sure, but does Elixir have the exact same tutorial?

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