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Comment by siltcakes | Hacker News Reader

Every time I try to work on someone's Haskell code, I'm confronted with a slew of custom infix operators, and I find my previous experience is completely irrelevant as I learn the new DSL the authors chose to write (which more often than not also involves flexing their brain as hard as they can).

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But that's like half of computing.. every new tool the world inflicts on you, configured in Jojo's Awesome Configuration Language, with some arbitrary made up grammar punctuated by Tourette outbursts of special character line-noise.

That, or YAML, then a tool to template and generate the YAML, and then a stack of tools wrapped around that, ad infinitum.

A little learning is the cost of not having to write the thing yourself. On the other hand, hell is the non-composable tower of babel that is computing. Total employment by exponentially compounding incidental complexity.

I think it's a sliding scale and Haskell is definitely on the extreme end.

The fact that people do it in the ordinary language, so you can click through to the operator definition and see immediately what it does, makes it a lot less taxing IMO. Even if the code is quite complex, figuring out what an actual function does is 10x easier than doing the same with a magic annotation, which is what you have to do in that situation in most other languages.

It's one of many reasons I love Go.

The amount of arbitrary glue, configuration and "cool things" I need to learn-and-forget for every new project is an order of magnitude less than any other language I've used in anger.

I don't know that I really exactly like working with Go but I do have to hand it to them, they did nail this aspect of it.

I don't see how that is language specific. I think it's entirely based on the project size.

Pick up docker or kubernetes and you'll have to learn plenty of stuff. Pick up ory/hydra to do auth in go, same thing.

Check out the age (from FiloSottile) or the rage (Rust port) codebase and they require similar level of understanding.

Right, now imagine the templated YAML mess implemented in Haskell together with the app. By someone smart enough to liberally use Haskell's most complicated features

I'm sure it is super cool and immediately comprehensible for an independent project. I'm actually really fascinated by programming languages like APL that take it even further, I'd like to try some of those out but I don't have a great fit for a project to use with them.

But all I can think of when I see custom operators professionally is how much of a nightmare it would be the second one has to onboard a junior developer onto the project.

It's super cool, but I'm not sure immediately comprehensible. I can't even read my own Haskell code after a few months away from it. You end up using other people's infix operators from the libraries and it's easy to forget what they are.

That's interesting, because Haskell is the only language in which I can easily read code written by others (and in "others" I include "myself three years ago").

Same! Well, Rust fits the bill too.

Generally, any language with a type system advanced enough.

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