Comment by GhotiFish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GhotiFish | Hacker News Reader

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I'm sorry, but as I've tried to learn Haskell in 2 month sprints 4 separate times and failed, I can not in good conscience recommend Haskell, ever. I like the language allot, but even the programmers I believe are extremely talented just cannot learn it, let alone 99% of people I have to work with who simply can not even begin to make use of the language at it's most basic form.

A professor I knew, who was easily one of the more decorated in my university, claimed he knew Haskell.

I had used Haskell to parse biomedical data for my course on biometrics, as the data was inconsistent and full of errors, the correct design was to create a monadic structure. I consulted that professor, and he was flummoxed, just on the basic structure of the program (which was done in a basic top down style of declaring the types and breaking large functions into small ones).

I fully accept my inability to use the language in a useful way may just be symptomatic of me being an idiot. I fully accept that my professors inability to understand the language in a any way may be symptomatic of him being an idiot.

But as big a failure as I am at learning this language, I can't imagine the result of tasking someone who doesn't enjoy programming with maintaining Haskell.

If scala is worse, then that's just horrifying.

Just considering the language, then I think Scala is considerably easier to learn than haskell _if_ you're from an OO background. It's a multi-paradigm language making it easy to use it like a better c++11. However, idiomatic Scala is functional, and so you're pushed in another direction by the community (but, importantly, not forced). However, starting with a blank slate, then Haskell might be the easier language to learn.

But if we consider the resources to learn the language along with the language, then I think Scala dominates Haskell. Haskell was painful for me to learn because to become proficient I had to trudge through not only books but wikis, blogs, and code. There is nothing like Odersky's Scala book in Haskell. Learn you a Haskell, the Haskell wikibook, and Real World Haskell are all _terrible_ at preparing someone to become a proficient haskeller because while they show you the language they don't train you to think functionally.

In imperative languages you're giving a lot of sequential instructions to a robot. In functional languages you're programming the robot to understand a new language, and then you describe the way things ought to be in that language.

This is another thing I persistently thought while I was learning Haskell

   "It's a paradigm shift, you're used to programming
    imperatively, this is not imperative. Think back to when
    you first started programming, you got caught on doing
    simple things, right? This is the same."

On sober reflection, I don't buy this logic any more. Haskell's ability to be generic is really cool, so cool that it has a massive standard library of itemized, tried and tested bits of logic that can be used anywhere, and I do mean anywhere. All of which you as a new programmer are tasked with getting acquainted with. As a new programmer you must abstract your program out in a way that fits one or more these component pieces, that can fit the standard library. Ouch.

Of course, this library only gives you a toolbox to cover some fundamental logic, you can express really interesting things in short lines if you're skilled enough to abstract your problem out into general behaviour. Even I got this far, but when the problem your working on is best modelled through state, which is basically everything, you now have to understand monads.

What portion of the population do you think can utter these words confidently? "I Understand Monads"

Haskell provides no ramp up, there is no learning curve. I don't believe Haskell's problem is that it's different, I believe it's problem is that it's different and difficult.

It is different and difficult. I think that's because functional programming isn't simply a sideways step from imperative programming, but is instead a level of abstraction higher than imperative programming.

Hofstadter says analogy is the core of cognition. We tie unknown things to known things to understand them, and I think that's why you get all these bad analogies where people try to tie the more abstract concepts of fp like monads to everyday things ( "monads are like burritos," for example).

And this really doesn't make sense because monads and such are pure abstractions. How do you tie a pure abstraction to something concrete? It's like saying zero is like a burrito.

The better analogies tie pure abstractions like monads and arrows to other abstractions that you already understand. For instance, Odersky trains you by iteratively refactoring imperative Scala code into more functional code, and thereby gradually carrying you up the ladder of abstraction.

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