Comment by maximente | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maximente | Hacker News Reader

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in my (limited) experience, Haskell projects (and to a slightly lesser extent, functional programming projects) work best when thoroughly planned out in thorough whiteboard/spec sessions and are then implemented by a couple of gurus responsible for the code, who work almost exclusively in functional languages in their day to day. there seems to be a need for way more thought-per-line-of-code in Haskell/FP projects.

many engineers (and businesses!), culturally, come from the opposite angle (legions of generally pluggable engineers on java/python/golang plowing through tickets/features). that's fine, but it isn't super amenable to the Haskell world, because IME non-imperative setups require different mode of thinking about design, so harder to drop in and crush a ticket. i wish i could explain this more, but i'm struggling to articulate with examples.

i think the thorough types really help you get up to speed on data structures, but unless you are in a functional mindset pretty much exclusively, your (my?) brain spends a lot of time un-imperative-ing itself. also, laziness can be a factor, so need some expertise there.

it also helps to have conventions e.g. old school java (are we point free, or not? etc. etc.)

all in all i think it requires a lot of discipline that can easily break down, whereas some of the popular imperative languages you can still sort of plug along (=> punt the technical debt) despite that.

> all in all i think it requires a lot of discipline that can easily break down, whereas some of the popular imperative languages you can still sort of plug along (=> punt the technical debt) despite that.

Interestingly I have the exact opposite perspective. Writing imperative or OOP code requires me to be excessively disciplined. It is extremely easy to build un-maintainable spaghetti. There is a whole cottage industry of methods for your discipline of choice: Clean, SOLID, TDD, etc. All these disciplines seem to boil down to the same systemic result, push effects to the edges of you program so you can more easily test, evolve and maintain. Functional programming (of the typed variety) tends to allow me to write garbage code, that is testable and can be easily evolved and maintained because the paradigm encourages me to be a good actor.

I've refactored production code in imperative languages and typed functional languages and only one of them allowed me to make HUGE sweeping changes with ease and high confidence.

> There is a whole cottage industry of methods for your discipline of choice: Clean, SOLID, TDD, etc.

I'm not a big OOP fan, but I'm pretty sure Clean and SOLID are principles (or sets of principles), while TDD alone is a practice. I'm also not very familiar with Clean or SOLID, but I'm pretty sure they apply to Haskell as well, and I would expect that Haskell enthusiasts would ordinarily boast that Haskell allows (or encourages) them to write code that is more SOLID with less effort than other languages.

My criticism of Haskell is that there tends to be an obsession with writing the most SOLID/DRY/etc code possible at the expense of productivity. It's a code golf / ego culture.

Yes, this is cultural and not "built into the language" (quotes because I doubt there's a clear distinction between a programming language's culture and the language itself, but that's a debate for another time), but you can't unplug from the culture, because you need the ecosystem to solve any nontrivial problem (so you still have to interface with overly clever code).

Further, even if you could unplug from the culture (perhaps by writing everything in-house under your own improved culture), there are still no 'rails' that encourage naive, flat-footed, dumb code, and that's the kind of code you want 99% of the time. As far as I'm aware, there isn't even a clear standard for writing clear, naive code in Haskell.

SOLID applies only to OOP. Not using classes trivially satisfies the requirements of every letter. Hell, most design patters are trivial if you use functional programming.

Funny because I see fp as tdd^2 + IO on the side (npi) thus bringing all the benefits you like from oop. Only difference is I think a few decades of culture using these bu default leading to terse syntax and idioms.

> in my (limited) experience, Haskell projects (and to a slightly lesser extent, functional programming projects) work best when thoroughly planned out in thorough whiteboard/spec sessions

I think you need more experience then! I'd rather prototype in Haskell than the other language that I use day-to-day, that people say is great for "exploratory coding" (Python).

My experience is quite the opposite. I can throw together Haskell code and refactor it much quicker than equivalent C++/Java code. And I have a lot more experience with C++/Java than Haskell.

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