On: Four months with Haskell

[progman]

If people claim that Haskell is "pretty simple" and Java is "more complicated" then why in the world is there almost no evidence for that? Why are things like Eclipse and Netbeans availabe for many years why Haskell is still blaming itself by fighting the very basic cabal hell? I know sandboxes and Nix and all those tools which circumvent the cabal hell. But consider how the Java world would respond if Java 9 would require sandboxes or Nix to manage every software project :-)

I like Haskell, and I consider Haskell far superior (and more complicated) than Java. I also know Java pretty well. Java is far from being "more complicated" than Haskell. There is a reason why there are way more Java developers than Haskell developers. In my experience Haskell is powerful and elegant but not very practical. Practical are other languages (Rust, C++, Java, Nim, OCaml, ...). That' why Eclipse, Open Office, MS Office, operating systems, mars land projects and other big software is written in everything but Haskell.

https://www.quora.com/Functional-Programming-Which-of-Haskel...

[codygman → progman]

I disagree that Haskell is not practical. Checkout the Yi[0] project for instance, it has lots of practical real world Haskell code patterns.

0: https://github.com/yi-editor/yi

[progman → codygman]

I did not claim that Haskell is not practical. I said it is not _very_ practical.

Yi is nice. There is also Leksah which looks even more appealing.

http://leksah.org/images/Bildschirmfoto-leksah-13-linux.png

I just wonder why are there are so few practical applications if Haskell is so practical and "simple".

[js8 → progman]

I think there is a problem in your thinking with conflating "simple" and "practical". You can have a more complicated thing being more practical simply because there is a better tooling or ecosystem, as you correctly point out.

[progman → js8]

What is the worth of "simple" if it is not "practical"?

Turing machines can do all computable things. They are the most simple computers yet they are not practical at all.

> You can have a more complicated thing being more practical simply because there is a better tooling or ecosystem

The point I am making is that after 25 years of age "simple" Haskell should have be a better ecosystem than Java.

[JadeNB → progman]

> What is the worth of "simple" if it is not "practical"?

I cannot speak for js8, but I think you took his or her statement of personal preferences as a statement of value. (That is, I think that the statement that he or she preferred a simple language was not the statement that it was 'worth' more in any abstract sense.) I imagine that everyone in this discussion would agree that 'simple' and 'practical' are different. I personally think that the lambda calculus is even simpler than the theory of Turing machines, and yet probably still less practical. I enjoy the theoretical beauty and austerity, and I imagine that js8 is in somewhat the same boat.

(For an extreme example of going the other direction, consider Perl, which is an eminently, even sometimes excessively, practical language, but which none among even its most ardent fans—and I am one!—would call simple.)