Comment by spekcular | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spekcular | Hacker News Reader

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How do I decide? I look at the features and documentation for each language, and try to figure out what problems it is best suited for. I also ask various people I trust (and HN commenters!).

I agree: If the problem is "How do I get paid?" and the best available job requires learning Haskell, then learn Haskell!

But, I think this is kind of an evasive answer. First, not many jobs require Haskell, so if my choice of language is dictated by economic concerns I'm better off with, say, Python or various web dev stacks. Second, because I have in mind a situation in which the implementer has a fixed problem and is trying to figure out which language to use. (A personal project, say.) I'm sorry if this was not clear.

So, I ask again: are there any problems for which Haskell is a better solution than Rust?

edit: Regarding the Ruby question, I think the language has various flaws, but going into detail would take way too time. A shorter answer is: numpy, scipy, pytorch, numba.

> I look at the features and documentation for each language, and try to figure out what problems it is best suited for

Well, and what have you found so far in relation to Rust and Haskell? It seems to me you know what you have to do.

Let's assume your answer is "I read every introductory page in wiki.haskell.org, read and worked through a couple of tutorials, and I still cannot figure it out". If so, do you think a comment here in HN is going to convince you of picking language X over Y?

> So, I ask again: are there any problems for which Haskell is a better solution than Rust?

Realistically, which kind of answer do you expect? A summary of the "Why Haskell" and "Why Rust" pages? I'm sure they exist and you could take a look at them and decide.

> If so, do you think a comment here in HN is going to convince you of picking language X over Y?

Yes. Because I'm a highly fallible person and very open to the idea that a Haskell expert might be able to point out a good use case that I missed.

> Realistically, which kind of answer do you expect? A summary of the "Why Haskell" and "Why Rust" pages? I'm sure they exist and you could take a look at them and decide.

The selling point of Rust is (very, very) roughly "C++ without the bad parts, and some more good parts." Given the demonstrated utility of C++ (and demonstrated pitfalls) this is manifestly appealing. Avoiding memory safety related security holes alone is huge.

That's an example of the kind of answer I expect.

> a Haskell expert

I'm not a Haskell expert, I just dabbled with it and liked it.

> The selling point of Rust is (very, very) roughly "C++ without the bad parts, and some more good parts." Given the demonstrated utility of C++ (and demonstrated pitfalls) this is manifestly appealing. Avoiding memory safety related security holes alone is huge.

The selling point of Haskell is that it's a Functional Programming first language (see: "Why Functional Programming Matters"), has a better statically type system than C/C++/Java which makes whole classes of bugs common in those languages harder to write in Haskell (so if writing correct code is a priority, that's your use case), and memory safety related security holes are harder to write, just like with Rust. Laziness (or non-strictness, whatever) is also a big if controversial selling point (why: read "Why Functional Programming Matters").

If you like slightly less opinionated (or non-strict by default) languages, you could go with OCaml or Standard ML instead.

Why would you prefer Rust? Why don't you ask a Rust advocate?

Rust has better tooling, more direct control in performance-sensitive contexts (no opaque performance traps like, arguably, Haskell), and more community/industry support (meaning more useful and high quality packages). So from the perspective of practically solving problems, it seems better to me. But I could be convinced otherwise by a good argument.

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