Hacker News Reader

Comment by timwaagh | Hacker News Reader

as others have already said Haskell's type system is more powerful. however more powerful does not always mean superior. Java strikes a balance between flexibility and ease-of-understanding, whereas Haskell allows you to construct the most convoluted mathematical abstractions imaginable. which is probably why Java is so popular in the enterprise and why many successful newer languages essentially copy its type system.

View on HN

Java's types become incomprehensible once you start trying to do anything complex with generics.

Haskell _allows_ you to write some true type monstrosities (cf. Lens), but almost all the useful instances of that are wrapped in libraries. Types in app code are typically very readable and expressive.

My main complaint with Haskell's type system vs Java's is actually that Haskell has too few type annotations. The inference is good enough that you usually don't need anything besides the function header, which can make it harder to read code without an IDE if you don't know what types certain functions have.

Standard coding practice is to write type signatures for functions.

What is the state-of-the-art for Haskell IDEs? The last time I was doing Haskell in anger, I was a college freshman using GHCI and, I think Geany, which was slightly a nightmare. I would expect that there ought to be some pretty powerful stuff nowadays.

I personally use VSCode with the Haskell IDE Engine as a backend.

It's definitely not as nice as something like Visual Studio or IntelliJ, but it's not too bad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com