How and why Haskell is better (than your favorite $LANGUAGE) | Hacker News Reader

How and why Haskell is better (than your favorite $LANGUAGE)

vadosware.io

23 pointsallenleee7 comments

Tried reading the post. Still couldn't see anything "better" in this convoluted way of representing intent. With a background knowledge of C, Perl, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Go, Basic, Pascal, Assembly, Bash, and probably a couple more I forgot to mention - this Haskell thing always looked to me like a bad idea. And whenever Haskell is mentioned, it is always in the context of someone trying to persuade you its a good idea. idk, very fishy.

Personally I get intrigued whenever people talk passionately in a jargon about a subject I don’t know: I want to find out what it is about and what exactly fascinates them. And I want to be fascinated by it as well (if possible), maybe they know something I don’t.

So, I get into it and in the end I maybe understand, but I also realise that just by reading it I would have never gotten the complete picture, I had to experience it myself to get there.

In the case of Haskell I like it a lot, even though I don’t use it on the job, the insights I’ve had I am able to utilise in other programming languages (C# at my current job) Anyway, even if that was not a possibility, the journey itself was nice. So maybe just try it out with some tutorials? Or don’t if you don’t feel like it

By the way it maybe appeals more to programmers who build their mental model around the code itself and not the machine running it. (This is an intuition I have which I cannot back up, but I got to know programmers who have to try everything out to understand it, see how the computer reacts and build their mental model around it, and I know programmers who reason about the code itself, the meaning it has. Maybe this intuition is BS.)

Brief posts on Haskell tend to be a bit bloody evangelical.

A better introduction for anyone with a serious interest would be a good book and a look at the kind of work serious Haskell users do.

eg: [1] http://book.realworldhaskell.org/ [2] https://www.haskellers.com/user/dons

What if Haskell is my favourite language?

Then it's a fixed point?

"Haskell’s syntax takes some getting used to like most other languages, but it is beautiful."

If by beautiful he means confusing, he's right. First i thought than "foo" was a comment, then he said ++ is for string concatenation ( why not only one "+" ?).

Because + is already taken. The way Haskell has done math operations, using + on strings would mean you'd also have to define - and * and a couple others.

edit: the confusion on that being a comment is likely due to linewrap issues in the site. That's not a Haskell thing, that's just this person's css.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com