Comment by bradrn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bradrn | Hacker News Reader

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> What I like about Haskell is that it is unashamedly a language for programming language research, by programming language researchers

Wait, what? This runs completely counter to my experience of Haskell. I use it whenever I can, and I’m pretty sure I’m not a PL researcher. Lots of other programmers write actual, real-world programs in Haskell as well. Much of the discussion I see in Haskell communities concerns areas such as performance, toolchains and libraries — areas which PL researches are famous for ignoring. I will admit that we often talk about GHC extensions and type theory and whatnot, but the discourse around those areas is not all that mathematical; it tends towards ‘how is this useful for writing programs?’. In other words, exactly like every other real-world programming language out there.

(That being said, maths is fun, and I regularly see people defining weird and wonderful abstractions. But this rarely gets in the way of writing programs. If anything, every now and then someone comes up with an abstraction which turns out to be incredibly useful in practice: lenses, free monads, applicativeṣ, HKTs…)

I didn't mean to imply that nobody else but PL researchers can use Haskell, clearly a lot of people do. What my post intended to convey was that the focus of the language seems a lot more focused on research than (say) Ruby or Javascript. This is not strange, given its history as a designed-by-committee language "to serve as a basis for future research in functional-language design". (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_(programming_language)... )

The point in your last sentence that "every now and then someone comes up with an abstraction which turns out to be incredibly useful in practice" is exactly what I meant in the OP: these abstractions seem to be developed way more often in Haskell first and then they leak to other programming languages later than the other way around.

Yeah, I'd say that Haskell has done a phenomenal job for most of its history of maintaining a balance between the interests of researchers, commercial programmers, educators, and enthusiasts/hobbyists. At different times, each of these communities has been inconvenienced by decisions made by the Haskell community, but the community has nevertheless been for the most part welcoming to all of them. On the other hand, some of the darkest chapters of the community have involved power plays where one of these groups feels entitled to sideline the others and decides it should be in charge.

By contrast, a typical mainstream programming language might, say, completely neglect one or more of these communities in favor of whatever is best for commercial programmers. Particularly when, like most mainstream languages, it's mainly funded by those interests.

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