Hacker News Reader

Comment by clacke2 | Hacker News Reader

The next Haskell will be strict

   -- Simon Peyton Jones

http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/%7Egmh/appsem-slides/peytonjones.pp...

/via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1924061

View on HN

Yes, but not because laziness was a technical failure, but for something more resembling PR reasons. Haskell's laziness by default ends up being a large stumbling block for many developers not used to thinking in that way.

Although I understand why Idris is strict by default, there is a part of me that dies a little from that understanding :(

The main problem with laziness is that, according to SPJ "[l]aziness makes it much, much harder to reason about performance, especially space."

Of course, lazy-by-default also brings many advantages: http://augustss.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/more-points-for-lazy-...

It's not so much a PR failure, as an ergonomics issue -- making laziness the default makes it too easy for people to create performance problems for themselves.

Haskell's laziness undoubtedly works and is useful; you might say it was Haskell's strictness that needed improving.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com