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Comment by airza | Hacker News Reader

i have learned a lot of interesting facts about haskell and lisp from this post. those facts make me want to run screaming away from trying to use either of them to develop software. My time with Haskell made me a better programmer and I bet that LLMs made some of the documentation more intelligible, but...

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I have other reasons - mostly hiring competent engineers that deeply undertand the language. I can hire a competent SpringBoot engineer who can "fill out the form" and have a fast-enough API ready in a few days. Will it be beautiful and elegant? Probably not. Will it take traffic and get the data from the producer into a database reliably? Most likely.

From my time with Haskell, I learned to REALLY think about types. Like, REALLY. Having a type doc above every function that describes a curried path, is really cool. It made OCaml documentation (which I consider among the worst) make sense. (No shade at OCaml as a language. I LOVE it. But their docs aren't gonna win any awards)

What in particular makes you want to run away? I have found that the some what cliched(but true) comment that type signatures are mostly what you need for documentation even with heavy transformer code. I am some what confused by the post in question saying their repl experience in haskell was bad, I found the repl very powerful and worked well. The things I disliked of haskell the most was the package management, templating, issues around lazy eval, program start up time, program performance (particularly memory size) and some library's being overly based on some abstract mathematical model for little benefit and lots of cost and less flexibility and template haskell again because I really hate it. working on a common lisp project at the moment and it's quite nice thought he package manager story is a little bad in the very opposite direction to haskell in that it's too bare bones (quicklisp) but it's pretty easy to just git clone repos you want and use asdf to load them (asdf is a little weird to start but when you understand the whole load system repo stuff and central-registry variable your good to go and build what ever you want around it.

Another annoying thing with common lisp is when macros badly expand that can be tricky to debug.

You may already know of these, but for others curious:

I'm also not a huge fan of quicklisp, though bundles[0] made it a little more bearable for me. You may also consider vend[1], ocicl[2] (heavily AI-assisted recently), or qlot[3].

  [0] https://www.quicklisp.org/beta/bundles.html
  [1] https://github.com/fosskers/vend
  [2] https://github.com/ocicl/ocicl
  [3] https://github.com/fukamachi/qlot

For macroexpansion, SLIME and SLY have macrostep functionality that lets you expand macros in place, which has helped me immensely on more than one occasion, though you can also manually expand with macroexpand.

Thank you for this, I knew only of ocicl and have only been using macro expand in the repl, will have to try macrostep.

My work flow for packaging is very hacky at the moment, I have sbcl install on the host but mostly for developing I run in a podman container and download repos of libraries as I need them and then mount them in a volume and also mount a link farm to load all the asdf systems and that is set up by the initialization script and starts swank and any other initialization needed. probably ocicl does a lot of what I want but for a particular things I was doing I was I also wanted to modify a library so it evolved like this it might be a little insane but new to common lisp development so might be bad.

my favorite part of Haskell is that it's thorny which keeps bads away. like a good washout course in college. keeps the community "pure" kek

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