Comment by ff_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ff_ | Hacker News Reader

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This is an interesting paper, and I'd like a replication today, 25y after: I believe Haskell has matured a lot in all of this time.

As an experiment, some months ago we prototyped a new service in Haskell at work. We timeboxed a week for it (two people, proficient in Haskell), and the result is that (1) the Product Owners were really pleased with it, and (2) even if it was really bad Haskell code, we _still_ managed to encode business logic in the types so that it would always hold some important invariants. As a result we had to fix a surprisingly small amount of things before putting it in production.

The best thing is that as it happens we couldn't properly rewrite the prototype, so today's service is still the same codebase, BUT it's not a Python blob and it was such a breeze to refactor.

EDIT: would anyone be interested in a blog post "Rapid Prototyping in Haskell"?

C++, also, is an entirely different, and overwhelmingly more powerful, language, than in 1994.

Yes, I would be very interested!

Same

> would anyone be interested in a blog post "Rapid Prototyping in Haskell"?

Yes. Please.

"Rapid Prototyping in Haskell"

would be fantastic.

What is a "Python blob"?

As someone who writes a lot of Python, I'd say a Python blob is a half-formed idea expressed in Python without any particular thought given to design or conceptual clarity. Just enough to get the job done if you don't encounter any surprises, but not something you'd want to maintain. You expect it not to handle all of the edge cases and when it raises an exception you jump in and code around it at the point where it's raised, rather than fixing the root cause, which is lack of design. Unfortunately, a lot of Python starts out like this and then ends up being maintained anyway.

edit: What makes it blobbly is its lack of structure. It doesn't express any clear idea of the domain and tends to devolve into spaghetti.

I would!

Yes please!

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