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Comment by YcombRegBroken | Hacker News Reader

Haskell (and most of the other languages mentioned) is exceptionally clever. This, above all else, is it's downfall. For me, especially when tasked with building a high productivity development team, clever code is a ticking time bomb. It's easy to write, but hard to maintain and modify. It requires more mental ram to analyze any given piece of code, and is much more difficult for multiple programmers to contribute to. It's tiny, to be sure, but, again, I think that is negative, not a positive. Maximum clarity is not minimal code.

Go, on the other hand, is not clever. It's boring as hell, honestly. This is a Very Good Thing® when it comes to building out a dev team, and I feel, the single biggest reason Google put the resources into creating it.

As for the crashing, of course I see some dangerous areas. Educating developers on avoiding a small regions of pitfalls is much easier than managing a team of clever coders though.

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I disagree that Haskell is "clever". I think Haskell is "smart".

Using "Maybe a" when you have a nullable value is smart, not "clever". It aids maintenance and readability, not hampers it.

Using pattern matching is the same.

Haskell builds on mathematicaly simplicity, which makes things hard to grasp at first. This may be mistaken for cleverness.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you -- can you give an example of something clever in Haskell?

I would go so far as to say Haskell is better.

But, then you gotta remember, "worse is better" (New Jersey style), and Go is worse. New Jersey style: (1) be simple in both implementation and interface (2) correct, be correct as long as it doesn't make it more complicated, simple is more important than correct (3) consistent, when you can be consistent, do be, but simplicity is more important and (4) completeness, be as complete as you can, but realize completeness can be sacrificed for any other objective.

I think C and Go share a lot of New Jersey style -- Go is great in simplicity (remember simple isn't easy). I think Go will continue to go quickly because of these attributes.

I'm not a haskell expert (obviously), but the time it takes me to parse things like this is time I would rather spend reading 5-10x the number of lines and getting the meaning right away.

  let loeb x = fmap ($ loeb x) x in 
  loeb [ (!!5), const 3, liftM2 (+) (!!0) (!!1), (*2) . (!!2), length, const 17]

(btw, I have no idea what the hell this does. Something to do with spreadsheets, apparently. I found it on http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blow_your_mind, which has enough cleverness to make me want to cry)

I've seen cleaner and more readable code in production haskell, but this sort of thing happens enough that I'm very cautious.

I think the first paragraph of the page linked explains why that code is so impenetrable. You will not have to read or write Haskell like that, ever. Good find though! On a similar note, the Haskell community is amazing. You can learn absolutely everything between the Haskell wiki, freenode irc and hackage. How great is it that EVERY lib/package/framework is documented on hackage in exactly the same format? Very great. Coming back to JavaScript is a bummer :(

I don't think you'll ever find this kind of code in production.

With years of Haskell experience, I rarely encounter code that is hard for me to read. This is a good counter-example, and is not typical code.

I read 10 lines of Haskell code roughly as fast as I read 10 lines of Python code -- yet the 10 lines of Haskell code can pack much more useful information.

So Haskell is a great tool for more efficient communication between programmers, who can write shorter messages to each other to convey the same information.

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