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Comment by Ericson2314 | Hacker News Reader

You are still wrong, dispite your disclaimers. Haskell has a tiny core language, which neatly breaks apart complexity. Most mainstream languages don't, which makes them far harder to thoroughly understand. there's no way easy to know what complexity is essential, and what can be reduced away. Abstractions are rather informal, and likely to leak.

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Your argument is that a language with a 750,000 line implementation and a zillion features is simple because one of its IRs is simple? Doesn't seem very convincing.

Haskell2010's definition is like 20 pages long and that includes the definition of the standard library. This core accounts for 90-99% of the code in project that isn't going out of its way to use fancy features for the lulz.

Name me a single company that uses Haskell 2010. It's completely irrelevant.

But I'll leave you to argue with Vitaly Bragilevsky (speaking at Galois):

"Haskell is a big language" -- https://galois.com/blog/2018/11/teaching-haskell-in-the-real...

Or Paul Hudak, Philip Wadler, and Simon Peyton Jones:

"Haskell is a big language" -- https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/... (p.28)

Maybe those guys know something.

It's cool Haskell goes through a small IR. That doesn't make TH, rewrite rules, CPP, the million extensions, STG, the runtime, the gigantic syntax, or the quarter million SLOC implementation simple.

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