Hacker News Reader

Comment by gaze | Hacker News Reader

grr. this has nothing to do with haskell.

Ture, but notice how easy and natural it is in Haskell. You can do the same thing in Python, as noted in the comment by jordigh -- but it takes ~40 lines, as opposed to ~8 lines in Haskell. I'm willing to bet that it's even more verbose in C++, and I don't even want to think about doing it in Java.

I aimed for clarity and some extra features in mine (e.g. __repr__ and __str__) instead of code golfing it. I also used the actual Binet formula instead of just approximation.

The only big Haskell feature here is a default implementation of binary exponentiation, but this is a library feature, not an innate feature of the language. It would be easy enough to augment existing standard Python libraries with such a corresponding feature.

The "deriving (Show)" gives you __repr__ and __str__ for free in Haskell.

It gives you a default that isn't very pretty. Python also has a default that isn't very pretty.

    (1 % 2) :+ (1 % 2)

Gives much more useful information than:

    <__main__.Qsqrt5 instance at 0xffee4d6c>

In fact, it encodes the same information given by your __str__ with the added benefit that it can be read back into a Q5 value:

    1/2 + 1/2 sqrt(5)

Of course, yours would be nicer to display to someone unfamiliar with Haskell's type constructors. No arguing that. But it's also clear that Haskell's derived show trumps Python's default __str__/__repr__.

It wasn't meant to be a criticism of your implementation - just a comparison of the two languages for this particular task. Haskell happens to be very concise for writing mathematical code. I love Python too, but for different reasons (easy to prototype, great libraries, flexible).

I've noticed that people with a mathematical background tend to be very attracted to Haskell. There's a great blog post by Dan Piponi enumerating eleven reasons to use Haskell as a mathematician:

http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/01/eleven-reasons-to-use-haskell...

I have a mathematical background, and I am not that attracted to Haskell. And I've tried. It seems that Haskell attracts logicians, which are their own particular subspecies of mathematicians, but I think far more mainstream mathematicians are attracted to Python. Sage is a prominent example of how easy it is for mathematicians to get into Python.

> It seems that Haskell attracts logicians, which are their own particular subspecies of mathematicians

Or perhaps people who care about foundations in general.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com