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Comment by koromak | Hacker News Reader

I'm just starting to learn Haskell and I honestly can't fathom how it gets written in production. Everything requires so much more consideration, which is fun and valuable in some situations, but not when you just need to get the damn thing done in time for a deadline.

I'm not experienced enough to know, but it does feel like Haskell prioritizes "clever" code. Very beautiful, but hard to understand at a glance.

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You can get features done very quickly in Haskell after the initial learning curve that most languages have. The type system lets you catch a lot of mistakes before runtime and in my experience things are more likely to work the first time in Haskell.

Testability does require some forethought but if your codebase always takes that into account then it's as easy as other languages.

Sounds like you just need more practice. Haskell is more expressive than most other languages and offers much more consistent and powerful abstractions. This does result in more productivity once the learning curve is overcome.

> I'm just starting to learn Haskell and I honestly can't fathom how it gets written in production. Everything requires so much more consideration, which is fun and valuable in some situations, but not when you just need to get the damn thing done in time for a deadline.

There are ways to write quick n dirty Haskell. Actually a super-power of Haskell is how easy it is to refactor from "quick n dirty" to "reasonable quality" without introducing defects.

> Actually a super-power of Haskell is how easy it is to refactor from "quick n dirty" to "reasonable quality" without introducing defects.

I call haskell "the language of maintainable spaghetti" in this spirit. It really is incredible how types can take 99% of the risk out of refactoring.

Indeed while I miss machine refactoring tools from Java, I've seen vanishingly few bugs result from manual refactoring in haskell.

It's sad you're getting downvoted only because you've commented (ever so slightly) negatively about people's language de jour.

I would argue that "Can people understand a unit of code without experience in that language/domain" is valuable, even if not the _most_ valuable aspect of a language. I also think dismissing this desire is usually an act of gatekeeping. "_I_ understand it so it's fine."

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