logoalt Hacker News

airzayesterday at 1:33 PM3 repliesview on HN

i have learned a lot of interesting facts about haskell and lisp from this post. those facts make me want to run screaming away from trying to use either of them to develop software. My time with Haskell made me a better programmer and I bet that LLMs made some of the documentation more intelligible, but...


Replies

nobleachyesterday at 2:27 PM

I have other reasons - mostly hiring competent engineers that deeply undertand the language. I can hire a competent SpringBoot engineer who can "fill out the form" and have a fast-enough API ready in a few days. Will it be beautiful and elegant? Probably not. Will it take traffic and get the data from the producer into a database reliably? Most likely.

From my time with Haskell, I learned to REALLY think about types. Like, REALLY. Having a type doc above every function that describes a curried path, is really cool. It made OCaml documentation (which I consider among the worst) make sense. (No shade at OCaml as a language. I LOVE it. But their docs aren't gonna win any awards)

kodomanyesterday at 1:51 PM

What in particular makes you want to run away? I have found that the some what cliched(but true) comment that type signatures are mostly what you need for documentation even with heavy transformer code. I am some what confused by the post in question saying their repl experience in haskell was bad, I found the repl very powerful and worked well. The things I disliked of haskell the most was the package management, templating, issues around lazy eval, program start up time, program performance (particularly memory size) and some library's being overly based on some abstract mathematical model for little benefit and lots of cost and less flexibility and template haskell again because I really hate it. working on a common lisp project at the moment and it's quite nice thought he package manager story is a little bad in the very opposite direction to haskell in that it's too bare bones (quicklisp) but it's pretty easy to just git clone repos you want and use asdf to load them (asdf is a little weird to start but when you understand the whole load system repo stuff and central-registry variable your good to go and build what ever you want around it.

Another annoying thing with common lisp is when macros badly expand that can be tricky to debug.

show 1 reply
whateveraccttoday at 6:40 PM

my favorite part of Haskell is that it's thorny which keeps bads away. like a good washout course in college. keeps the community "pure" kek