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Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

This is an interesting article.

It is the first critique of functional programming I've read from someone who clearly knows their shit.

I plan to look at miniKanren more when I get the chance.

I done a fair amount of math though likely less than the author but I have a similar impression - the things that are hardest to understand aren't necessarily the best tool for every job, despite their beauty. And beautiful abstraction for its sake can be a dangerous anti-pattern as much as excess hacks and simplicity.

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It is the first critique of functional programming I've read from someone who clearly knows their shit.

The critique is 'Haskell takes FP to an extreme and I show this is true because someone tried to implement miniKanren and needed Oleg to do it'.

That is not really a strong argument.

Also note that he isn't really arguing against functional programming, but pure functional programming.

the things that are hardest to understand aren't necessarily the best tool for every job, despite their beauty.

Haskell in itself is a very simple language. Most functor and monad instances are also easy to understand or use. I agree that there is a tendency in the Haskell community to put abstraction on abstraction, especially when the abstraction is new. But in the end, most of the Haskell packages that became widely-used (bytestring, text, vector) are easy to understand and use.

> The critique is 'Haskell takes FP to an extreme and I show this is true because someone tried to implement miniKanren and needed Oleg to do it'.

>That is not really a strong argument.

It's worse than that. The linked paper is about implementing minikanren as a monad transformer, which is a lot trickier than just porting it over, regardless of language. It's probably a lot easier in Haskell than in Scheme though.

Furthermore, if pure FP is useless, then monad transformers are useless too. But then the argument becomes "this useless thing is really tricky to implement in Haskell, therefore Haskell is useless". The only reason you would want Oleg's minikanren to be easy to implement is if you actually want pure FP. So the argument kind of negates itself.

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