Hacker News Reader

Comment by tanilama | Hacker News Reader

In other words, Go is designed for practicality. It shows design consideration to favor engineering while Haskell, as far as I can tell, barely cares.

View on HN

Haskell actually doesn't care by conscious choice: It's meant as a research language, and has "avoided success at all costs" (to use the tongue-in-cheek quote) to retain the freedom to play around with things. Which in turn lead to quite a few inventions that are now being copied by other modern languages (like Rust), though they rename them to make them less scary (apparently programmers are easily scared by names ... like the one that starts with M.).

That's a bit sad. On the other hand: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

It's actually "avoid (success at all costs)", rather than "avoid success, at all costs".

I don't know that it's sad at all. If you want to make a language to be a research language, there's nothing wrong with doing so. If that's what you want, being influential, having other languages steal your ideas is what success looks like.

If you want your language to be used by working software engineers, that's a different metric of success. But then, you'd do things differently if that was your goal.

Haskell, in achieving some real-world use, has achieved beyond the wildest dreams of a research language.

>In other words, Go is designed for practicality. It shows design consideration to favor engineering

To favor 1969-1975's engineering, you mean.

> implying that 1969-1975's engineering was worse than today's

Spoilers: it was (at least in regard to software development)

At least post-1975 software development had the Mythical Man-Month to reflect on.

Furthermore, advances in memory safe languages and type safe languages can both be considered good things. Unfortunately, Go is "almost there but not quite" in these two departments.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com