Hacker News Reader

Comment by djpowell | Hacker News Reader

Clojure programming might be more data-oriented than Haskell programming. I've never done any real-world Haskell programming, but I'd guess it'ld have a completely different feel.

The dynamic-typing means Clojure code is usually built around data-flows of maps/vectors/strings (generic information types that are trivial to integrate from different sources), trivial serialization, code-as-data.

I'd guess Haskell code is more likely to be built around abstractions based on the more powerful type system.

clojure.core.logic - a Prolog-like logic language that you can embed in the middle of a Clojure function - is a good example of something that is possible thanks to Clojure's lisp macros.

View on HN

> clojure.core.logic - a Prolog-like logic language that you can embed in the middle of a Clojure function - is a good example of something that is possible thanks to Clojure's lisp macros.

import Control.Monad.Logic

And! You don't macros for that. Macros are not used much in Haskell (only for very special cases), there's no need for them.

While useful, Control.Monad.Logic is not really an alternative to core.logic. It is a search monad more than anything, and it doesn't perform any unification or constraint propagation.

The type system gets a bit in the way when implementing something like miniKanren in Haskell. I suspect Clojure is a better fit for this kind of highly dynamic problem.

core.logic doesn't really use macros does it? Maybe to simplify the syntax, but macros is in no way required to build a core.logic library, at least not in the same way as core.async requires it.

The real beauty of macros is to simplify syntax without taking a runtime performance hit.

How would you implement thread-first or thread-last in Haskell without a runtime performance hit? Template Haskell?

Is say that the things you describe as Clojure's strengths occupy one part of Haskell's wheelhouse. The not change is that the flows orient over highly composed custom and built-in ADTs, but they're honestly hardly more painful than maps/vectors/strings while buying a lot of robustness.

And if you don't like that, it's easy to use "untyped" types as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com