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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

Though notice that you picked literally the most trivial example in the entire codebase that anyone can understand without explanation.

Elm is onto something with its obsession with simplicity and lack of features. I go back to old Haskell code and have to completely recredentialize in Haskell before I remember what's going on. I return to old Elm code and need very little ramp up.

I'm not making an "Elm > Haskell" argument, I just think experimentation with simplicity does this family of languages a favor.

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> Though notice that you picked literally the most trivial example in the entire codebase that anyone can understand without explanation.

I needed the explanation to understand what the code snippet was doing. Careful with those generalisations.

Well, non-programmers are even more helpless in understanding the code, but that's just not the point I'm making. Let's not require everyone to couch every statement in disclaimers, especially such an ancillary one.

And you surely can understand that code is trying to read a port or use a default one.

> And you surely can understand that code is trying to read a port or use a default one.

In programming languages which use paradigms I'm more familiar with, yes. In Haskell, not so much, which is the entire point of this thread.

Weird, I thought the point of this thread was how to bikeshed looking up environment variables while folks look at the proverbial camera and appeal to the hypothetical audience that `if x == null: ` would surely be morally superior.

> In Haskell, not so much, which is the entire point of this thread.

Yes, that's my point, too. I'm not sure what you're arguing with.

That you don't understand even the most trivial snippet in the code base is only a point in my favor. You're picking beef with an irrelevant detail and confusing it for disagreement.

Remember, I was replying to someone who is trying to show that Haskell isn't so hard once you break down a snippet. I pointed out that the snippet was the most trivial selection they could have picked, that the rest of the code is even harder so it's not a very big consolation. You chimed in that even the simplest snippet was still alien to you.

>Remember, I was replying to someone who is trying to show that Haskell isn't so hard once you break down a snippet.

That's not what I was trying to show, and I'm not sure how you got that sense. I was trying to show that even the most simple snippet requires a lot of background knowledge to understand.

On the other hand, Haskell's strength is its abstraction power. Elm intentionally lacks (some of) that punch, as do a lot of other languages.

But since Elm is a DSL it can afford to cap the abstraction somewhere whereas Haskell is perhaps built for more complex problems than just a client facing web UI.

Having learned both, I feel the abstraction level is capped too low on Elm, sadly.

Do you have a better example from this code base? I'm looking but unfortunately I'm not seeing anything that isn't either trivial or just a lot of monad stack handling.

Better examples of how Haskell can make the OP's eyes glaze over? Basically the rest of it.

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