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0 pointsseagreen8y ago0 comments

Haskell's rough to learn because it hits you with purity, category theory inspired typeclasses, and laziness all at once. It's natural that people struggle with this (I sure did).

If you feel like trying a pure language again someday you could consider PureScript (which just has the first 2 things above) or Elm (which just has the 1st). If you do try I'd like to hear how it goes, email in profile.

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krylon8y ago· 2 in thread

My main problem with Haskell was not the pure, funcational part. It was the side-effect-laden part.

If I were ever to go there again, I would probably give OCaml a try. It seems to offer many of the benefits of Haskell, while also offering "a way out" into the familiar world of objects and side effects. But don't hold your breath, I don't think I will get there this year.

hardwaresofton8y ago

What do you mean by the "side-effect-laden" part? Did you find yourself writing lots of side effecting code because of Haskell (which seems weird)? Or Haskell just wasn't a good fit for a project that was full of side-effecting code?

If it's the latter, I can definitely tell you that part of the zen of Haskell is firming up the boundaries between side-effecting code and pure code -- for example, IMHO the better you get at Haskell, the less `do` statements show up in your code (for better or for worse, because >>=, <*>, and co make it harder for newcomers to enter a codebase)

krylon8y ago

Writing a purely functional function like, say, factorial, or the Ackermann function, was no problem at all.

Writing a "purely" side effect-based one, say, read a string from stdin, parse an age, and say, "What, you are %d years old?!?! Wow, you're old!" completely eluded me.

Maybe it was just that all the tutorials I encountered sucked. Maybe I am just too dumb for Haskell. Given that I currently really love Go, I kind of suspect the latter. But who knows? I'll find out next year, I guess. ;-)

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