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Comment by weinzierl | Hacker News Reader

This thought completely neglects the idea that Haskell probably needs significantly less compiler runs because every run catches more errors and gives more information about them.

And that is not even considering how often the agent needs to run tests to get it right.

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It seems pretty clear that they do only minimal live testing during the "open a ticket, implement something, deploy it in production, all while the customer is still on the call" cycles. So your second concern is probably not relevant in this particular setting.

Regarding the first, I think you're probably right, but then again, if there is a 15-minute base cost, it's hard to amortize that through fewer incremental runs of the compiler.

(Which isn't to say that I think they are doing the right thing.)

The number of compiler runs doesn't matter as much as the total elapsed time it takes to finish the task. In just about every test we ran, LLMs are faster at building in Python than Haskell.

Lisp/smalltalk programmers have been going on about this tradeoff for a long time. It mattered before LLMs too. Lisp/Clojure repl allowing you to compile tiny parts of your program inside your running program is incredible for your feedback/iteration loop.

Ironically, this is also what makes them shine with LLMs, the LLM has access to the running program and can modify it while it's running to get feedback instantly.

Complex type systems are cool. But, they are not free. I say this as someone who's first programming language was Haskell.

> I say this as someone who's first programming language was Haskell.

Amazing. How did that happen? Is it true that functional programming is only counterintuitive because almost everyone starts out with an imperative language?

Philip Walder (one of the creators of Haskell) was our lecturer for my CS introductory course. I'd never done any programming before then.

Yes, imperative languages were initially counter intuitive to me. OO was even worse. SQL was fine as it's more declarative/functional.

> The number of compiler runs doesn't matter as much as the total elapsed time it takes to finish the task. In just about every test we ran, LLMs are faster at building in Python than Haskell.

How much faster? IOW, what's the difference (in minutes/seconds, not in percentages) between vibing Haskell and vibing Python?

I am wondering whether next year there will be re-write of Scarf after the vibe-code degenerative collapse of their source code into un-maintainability. At some point, the LLM patch/fix cycle will devolve into straitjacket.

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