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Comment by tom_mellior | Hacker News Reader

> or why I should try Haskell instead

Haskell has some nice things going for it. Its syntax is cleaner than OCaml's, for example. Still, it makes some things (like having a mutable variable, or a hash table) much harder than they should be. It's worthwhile looking at both over some rainy weekends. Whichever you end up preferring, you'll have learned useful things about both languages.

(OCaml is better, though ;-))

> any large cleany written codebases from which to study?

There is a big list of projects using OCaml at https://github.com/rizo/awesome-ocaml

Obviously, I can't vouch for cleanly-writtenness of any of them. Whichever you study would presumably depend on your area of expertise. There are packages there for anything from theorem proving to bioinformatics to web development. If you're into compilers, you could look at the OCaml compiler itself...

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> Haskell has some nice things going for it. Its syntax is cleaner than OCaml's, for example.

While I find the ocaml syntax very far from perfect, the whitespace sensitivity of Haskell makes it immediately worse. What a silly design.

IMHO, it's not so much that as the ASCII operator galore. $, <*>, the horrible lambda syntax... Sometimes it looks an opinionated Perl.

I don't know if you've worked with a production Haskell code base but it cannot be over stated what a poor decision operator overloading is. if they got rid of that it would immediately make Haskell an order of magnitude more practical

Haskell doesn't really have the problems that are commonly associated with operator overloading.

Haskell does have type classes, which do allow overloading, even of operators, but the type class uniquely determines the type of the operator - and there can be only one definition of any operator in scope.

Also, you can just define as many new operators as you like.

For these reasons, you can't have the madness of operator<< in C++, or whatever it is that Perl does with the same operator doing 5 completely different things depending on context.

> Haskell doesn't really have the problems that are commonly associated with operator overloading.

Nobody said it did. People said that it has its own brand of problems with operators looking something like >>+@*<>> peppering your code.

lol i wonder if you work on my team

>Also, you can just define as many new operators as you like.

this is exactly the problem

Haskell for hobby programming coupled with professional Perl experience gave me enough idea of what creative programmers could come up with in terms of ASCII art.

Haskell doesn't have overloading at all, either of operators nor of non-operator identifiers, so I guess you mean something else.

Do you mean user-defined operators, or do you mean operators whose type has a typeclass context?

If find these kind of comments really interesting, because for me Haskell's witespace-sensitivity immediately makes it a much better language! (I feel the same about Python).

It's interesting because (presumably) reasonable people really disagree on these issues.

How does the whitespace sensitivity make it immediately worse?

Unless experienced, you have no clue how a piece of code will be parsed. With ocaml, where is very little ambiguity; and indentation tools can take care of proper formatting, you only need to break lines.

And it can be pretty bad with haskell, which has complex semantics compared to, say, python.

With whitespace sensitive syntax, I feel like in the dark age of manual indentation.

By no means. Haskell's semantics are extremely simple. Python's are complicated.

Youmeanwhitespaceisbad?C64basicrules!

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