Comment by awinter-py | Hacker News Reader

Comment by awinter-py | Hacker News Reader

tagged in on a client project written in haskell

codebase organization was nonintuitive and I blame type-level programming

compilation was so slow and bad that other programs on my laptop started to die

the feature I was adding was something that would be library-provided in a normal web language

none of the operators have names and are very hard to google; I had to search for things like 'haskell tilde asterisk arrow'. Impossible to know what's from libs vs core language. Lots of explanatory docs online were like 'oh we don't pronounce this one'.

Core abstractions have no definition ('to explain that I would have to explain monads but you won't understand monads so GFY'). Monads are just sub rosa dependency injection .

lang doesn't protect you from runtime crashes but does apparently protect you from knowing where the program crashed

Haven’t written any serious Haskell, but doesn’t Hoogle work for searching infix operators?

One thing I really like about Haskell is Hoogle. The ability to search by function signature is great. I often wish I could do that in other languages.

searched `->` got

(->-) :: Bind m => (a -> m b) -> (b -> m c) -> a -> m c

semigroupoids Data.Functor.Bind

Fair enough. `->` is core syntax, not a library function. It means `->` if you're a Java guy or `=>` if you're a Scala guy.

Just search for it the same as you'd search for it in Java or Scala.

I'm open to the argument that my imperative / scripting background in some way primes me to learn rails but makes it hard for me to navigate a haskell codebase, and that this is human difference rather than one language being inherently more navigable than the other

> lang doesn't protect you from runtime crashes but does apparently protect you from knowing where the program crashed

Can you share a sample?

  square x = crash * x

  crash = undefined
 
  main = print (square 3)

Cause for me, this results in:

  foo: Prelude.undefined
  CallStack (from HasCallStack):
    error, called at libraries/base/GHC/Err.hs:78:14 in base:GHC.Err
    undefined, called at foo.hs:3:9 in main:Main

Maybe your mileage varied.

This is a relatively new feature. It used to say something like 'error: undefined' and exit.

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