Comment by Peaker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Peaker | Hacker News Reader

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"Haskell has no side effects" is true, but only in the sense that they are no longer side effects but simply "effects" as they are marked a such.

The idea isn't to get rid of effects but to quarantine them, separate them from simple functions into "procedures". This means you get to have real functions in Haskell, and they truly are easier to compose together than what other languages call "functions" but are actually procedures.

As for concurrency, Haskell is really in a unique spot, where you can get the performance of threads and the simplicity of processes: the immutability of everything not explicitly created for inter-thread communication gives you the same safety of IPC, but the shared memory gives you threads' performance.

I think the benefits outlined on the page may not be specific to web development, but they definitely apply to it too.

I haven't seen Tony Morris abuse anyone in the community, and the IRC channel is an amazing combination of immense knowledge and patience with newbies.

> I haven't seen Tony Morris abuse anyone in the community, and the IRC channel is an amazing combination of immense knowledge and patience with newbies.

Seriously? Here is the latest example on scala-debate, just two months ago, where he went so far off the deep end that Martin himself had to step in and tell him to cool down:

http://groups.google.com/group/scala-debate/browse_thread/th...

He dishes this kind of abuse on a regular basis on lists, irc (especially #scala) and sometimes even on his own Twitter feed.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand: yes, I know the theory behind immutability and isolation and how it can enable easier parallelism. I have yet to see practical examples of that in Haskell and convincing stats that show a boost in performance compared to more traditional approaches (such as Java+nio or even Scala actors).

My questions still hold regarding Haskell's adequacy in production, e.g. with regards to database, logging or continuous integration, and I'm not the only one: Alex Payne recently expressed the same concerns on SO:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5808825/what-are-the-best...

Yes, but nothing like that is happening in #haskell. I've asked some really stupid questions there, sometimes more than once, and been treated well. The "worst" treatment I've received is an admonishment to read the Haskell site for a more trivial question.

There are 16 official moderators on the #haskell channel, as well. I apologize (as one of those moderators) if the OP has had a bad experience: with so many people in the channel, not everyone gets exactly what they need, however, we do try very very hard to be friendly.

The principles of the channel require this, http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/IRC_channel#Principles -- if an op has treated you unfairly, please let us know, and we can correct the situation.

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