On Thu, 12 Apr 2012 23:04:16 +1200
James Miller <james@aatch.net> wrote:

> I wish I could love Haskell, and for pure computer science, it's fine, amazing even, but for real-world programming, it just doesn't cut it. The concepts are too difficult and not explained well enough, code rapidly becomes unreadable unless you maintain super-human discipline and broken code is difficult to fix.

I'm glad I'm not the only one arriving at the same conclusion.


Sincerely,
Gour

-- 
To deliver the pious and to annihilate the miscreants, as well as to reestablish the principles of religion, I Myself appear, millennium after millennium.

http://atmarama.net | Hlapicina (Croatia) | GPG: 52B5C810

On Thu, 12 Apr 2012 15:14:37 +0200
"bearophile" <bearophileHUGS@lycos.com> wrote:

> Haskell contains some ideas worth copying even in non-functional languages (or in mixed languages as D).

What do you miss in D from Haskell?


Sincerely,
Gour

-- 
To deliver the pious and to annihilate the miscreants, as well as to reestablish the principles of religion, I Myself appear, millennium after millennium.

http://atmarama.net | Hlapicina (Croatia) | GPG: 52B5C810

Gour:

> What do you miss in D from Haskell?

It's written a bit below in my post:

> lazy immutable lists, pattern matching, tuples and their
> various unpacking syntax, list comprehension, structural
> algebraic types, built-in currying and partial application

I am about to write a post about one of those.

Bye,
bearophile

Well, all these guys seem to disagree with you about using Haskell in
real-world programming

http://corp.galois.com/
http://www.eaton.com/Eaton/index.htm
http://blog.tupil.com/


--
Paulo

On Thursday, 12 April 2012 at 11:04:06 UTC, James Miller wrote:
> * Russel Winder <russel@winder.org.uk> [2012-04-10 21:02:03 +0100]:
>
>> On Tue, 2012-04-10 at 21:22 +0200, Gour wrote:
>> [...]
>> > In any case, as it is often said, I got a feeling that despite its
>> > potential cleanliness, the real-world Haskell code was not so readable.
>> 
>> That probably comes down to familiarity and personal taste.
>> 
>> > By deploying some coding discipline, we tend to believe that D can serve
>> > well as FP-language for the masses. :-)
>> 
>> Hummm... the really core issue is whether the language supports tail
>> call optimization.  Functional programming languages demand it, C, C++,
>> Java, Go, Python definitely don't have it, D...
>> 
>
> I used Haskell a bit a while back, and while I enjoyed using it, and was
> quite capable of writing in proper functional style, I found reasoning
> about the programs tedious and difficult. Due to the nature of
> "Everything is a function" (mostly), you end up with an incredible
> amount of functions for the simplest tasks. And some of the most common
> tasks in real-world programming, string processing and IO, are
> significantly more difficult in Haskell.
>
> Monads aren't a problem, the discussion of monads, by functional
> programmers is a problem. The moment some snobby functional programmer
> comes along and starts talking about category theory and some esoteric
> aspect of Type Algebra generalized of some field of Assholery, most
> people's brains turn off. It gets worse when you go: "How does this help
> read from a file" and they give you a long stare and start all over
> again, I just want to know how to read from a goddamn file!
>
> I wish I could love Haskell, and for pure computer science, it's fine,
> amazing even, but for real-world programming, it just doesn't cut it.
> The concepts are too difficult and not explained well enough, code
> rapidly becomes unreadable unless you maintain super-human discipline
> and broken code is difficult to fix. Case in point is darcs, which is a
> perfect application of real-word usage, and the GHC developers are
> complaining of it being unstable, bloated and impossible to fix, so they
> are moving to git (written in C no less).
>
> --
> James Miller

* bearophile <bearophileHUGS@lycos.com> [2012-04-12 15:14:37 +0200]:

> James Miller:
> 
> >I wish I could love Haskell, and for pure computer science, it's
> >fine, amazing even, but for real-world programming,
> >it just doesn't cut it.
> 
> Haskell contains some ideas worth copying even in non-functional languages (or in mixed languages as D).
> 
> Enforced purity and immutability, lazy immutable lists, pattern matching, tuples and their various unpacking syntax, list comprehension, structural algebraic types, built-in currying and partial application, and so on, are handy and allow to express certain computing idioms in a succinct and clear way (and not every part of a program needs the same runtime efficiency). Scala language shows that you can put several of those things in a language that supports mutability too.
> 
> Bye,
> bearophile

I like Scala, didn't really get it when I first looked at it, but that was a while ago, and I have learned Haskell since then, so I might give it another look. As I said, Haskell is a fine language, and the features are very useful.

My favorites are: partial function application, currying, list comprehension and lazy lists. There are others, but these are things that I miss the most from my time using Haskell

--
James Miller

On Thursday, 12 April 2012 at 13:36:41 UTC, Jeff Nowakowski wrote:
> On 04/10/2012 12:06 PM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>>
>> A curious fact is that the FP fans have much to thank to Microsoft, as
>> it is the company with more FP research on their paychecks. Many open
>> source fans are not aware that a few of the main developers in the Ocaml
>> and Haskell communities, work for Microsoft Research labs.
>
> I don't see any reason to thank Microsoft for this so much as to be wary of it. The same people that were getting paid to work on this stuff at universities in Europe, where software patents don't exist, are now getting paid to work at Microsoft, where patenting software is expected as part of the job.
>
> Microsoft has also in recent years been very aggressive with their patent portfolio, rattling their saber at Linux and suing Android distributors.

And yet IBM still is the number one champion in patents.

Or just, because they play nice most of the time with open source they are excused?

Patents are bad, regardless which company makes use of them.

On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 05:02:36PM +0200, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> On Thursday, 12 April 2012 at 13:36:41 UTC, Jeff Nowakowski wrote:
[...]
> >Microsoft has also in recent years been very aggressive with their patent portfolio, rattling their saber at Linux and suing Android distributors.
> 
> And yet IBM still is the number one champion in patents.
> 
> Or just, because they play nice most of the time with open source they are excused?
> 
> Patents are bad, regardless which company makes use of them.

All big companies are guilty of patent squatting. I distrust all of them. The bottomline is, once a company grows big enough, it acquires all sorts of vested interests in making more money, and retaining its position to be able to do so. Patent squatting is especially popular among contemporary high-tech companies. They essentially have no choice because they have to answer to their stakeholders. Only startups and grassroots companies have the chance of being decent in this respect.


T

-- 
I think the conspiracy theorists are out to get us...

On 04/12/2012 11:02 AM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>
> And yet IBM still is the number one champion in patents.
>
> Or just, because they play nice most of the time with open source they
> are excused?

I don't know why you are talking about IBM. Maybe you should reread my post. I'm talking about Microsoft because you brought them up.