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Comment by bedman12345 | Hacker News Reader

It’s slow. Example: quicksort [] = [] quicksort (p:xs) = (quicksort lesser) ++ [p] ++ (quicksort greater) where lesser = filter (< p) xs greater = filter (>= p) xs

It’s really complicated. Everybody includes lenses https://hackage.haskell.org/package/lens I don’t want to read all that stuff just for imperative syntax.

It’d both slow and hard to read. Compare these two: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

The c examples complexity lies in using SIMD. If you know simd it’s easy. You should know simd, it’s useful. The Haskell example is drivel. Long complicated and in the end hopelessly slow compared to the c example. You could als use simd in Haskell, but then it would just be C with extra steps.

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The Haskell looks much better, and I don't even know Haskell.

> If you know simd it’s easy.

Surely "if you know Haskell it's easy" is equally applicable.

> The Haskell looks much better, and I don't even know Haskell

Plain crazy take. The c example uses basic coding to implement some clever maths with special fast instructions. Thehaskell example is just some dumb algo implemented with complicated programming. There is obviously nothing good about that.

You can also look at a c example without simd https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... It’s shorter and simpler and faster than the Haskell version. It’s not even close???

> It’s really complicated > hard to read

You did not provide objective measures. You're just providing subjective opinions.

True. My statements are meaningful because of that. The objective measures we could agree on are obvious, so they need not to be stated. The heart of the debate is about the things that are hard to measure. As most things in software engineering. I ignored your question because it is a bad one.

No, your comments are nonsensical without it. You claim things as being inherently hard to read and understand. But this is a matter of one's personal context and experience. There are things that I'd find hard to read that you would not, and vice versa.

Just because you don't like something doesn't make it universally bad.

> You claim things as being inherently hard to read and understand.

I don’t.

> But this is a matter of one's personal context and experience. There are things that I'd find hard to read that you would not, and vice versa.

Obviously.

> Just because you don't like something doesn't make it universally bad.

Not my point.

My claim is that most people who want to be good software engineers can spent their time better than doing functional programming. I’m trying to disprove the opposite claim. That claim being that you’d learn something important from doing it or that functional programming offers something important to the programmer. I’m simply sharing the result of my journey through it so that others don’t have to make the same mistake. If it’s fun to somebody they should of course do it. What upsets me is that I was caught up in this delusion that functional programming is worth spending significant time on.

"makes things safer and more elegant, but I have never seen that in reality."

This is the claim that you're making. And yet terms like "elegant" have no objective definition.

> And yet terms like "elegant" have no objective definition.

Why does that matter? You seem to really think one needs objective definitions? It should be clear that whether a definition is objective or not is subjective itself. The question is whether there is some shared experience. And most people agree on what’s simple and what isn’t. You can now argue that’s all cultural, but that’s also a rather ridiculous position. We all experience advanced math as more complicated than 2 word sentences and so on. And I’m arguing, using my experience and examples, that functional programming is unnecessarily complicated. Requiring objective measures either misses the point. It’s really not a reasonable ask.

You made a definitive statement. You could have said something like "I find it to be less elegant", instead. But no, because you stated it as a truth there needs to be some measure of that.

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