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Comment by sdegutis | Hacker News Reader

Hey nice to see you here, your SO posts have tremendously helped me learn Rust.

I think Haskell is just too abstract for most of us. I love Rust traits and see how it directly came from Haskell but I couldn’t learn Haskell even after like 3 serious tries. Maybe a good portion of the problem is in the documentation and not the language? That said, the extremist purity is simply impractical compared to Rust which gets 90% of the way there without forcing all the architectural dances Haskell does. Just my opinion.

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You are quite welcome!

I can't add much to the Haskell part as I've only ever used it sparingly. In many aspects, I view Rust as only having one or two small things that are new (or at least new in a non-research programming language). Its big strength is combining a lot of existing good ideas in a principled manner.

I’d agree, basically Haskell is focused on academic purity and abstract experimentation while Rust is focused on being equally practical and innovative at the same time.

Haskell is actually used by companies to solve practical problems, a non trivial example being Facebook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlTO510zO78

Not too bad for an abstract experimentation.

Haskell is easier to learn than Rust because it's literally just math. There is no "dropping" variables and no need to side-step the lack of GC, because you never "drop" a variable that you've stopped using in a math proof. You just let the GC deal with all that stuff. And you don't have a "stack" vs. "heap" distinction, instead you work directly in terms of function arguments and the returned values. You have currying so you can work naturally with parameterized and partially-applied functions, just like in math, etc. Lazy evaluation for "infinite" sequences and objects. That kind of stuff.

> Haskell is easier to learn than Rust because it's literally just math.

That explains why it was so hard for me to learn: I'm awful at math. The most advanced math I could understand was high school algebra.

GC is OK if the only resource your program needs to manage is RAM; and, in particular if time is not among them. There are many such programs, including the favorites of Computer Science, such as compilers.

Add a single other resource, and now you need resource management. Once you have resource management, memory is the easiest thing to plug into it.

If you start out having resource management, you never wonder whether GC would be a good idea. GC turns into a solution desperately looking for a problem, and finding none in your neighborhood.

Haskell is great if you would rather be doing maths than solving actual, real-world problems. And, either don't care about performance, or like subverting your design to get it.

There are plenty of such people, and they need something to do that keeps them out of the way of people interested in solving real problems efficiently.

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