throwaway110034

How would you feel if Common Lisps suddenly started sporting infix operator notation?

Haskel's alien, counter-intuitive evaluation strategy was actually marketed (circa 2010) as a powerful performance-enhancer that facilitated optimizations that were difficult if not impossible to do in a strict language like C. Instead, it ironically tends to cause more performance problems than it solves, with hard-to-debug spaceleaks capable of taking down production systems.

The entire Miranda branch of the PL tree is likely going to prove to be an evolutionary dead end, and Haskell will eventually lose out to Idris or some other strict language. And I don't think it's a coincidence that the strictness pragma (which does not even give you a strict program) was added soon after Idris and the rest started getting traction.

> you can just start writing in a declarative style and not worry about debugging, because everything is checked by the type system

That is dangerously close to the infamous "if it compiles, then it works" boast, which Haskellers make all the time (while denying that they make it), demonstrating in the process that they don't write real software, where the defects one encounters are very often of a nature such that the program behaves exactly as intended by its authors, but the intended behavior is itself wrong. How does the type system help here?

My comment wasn't glib. I actually think those phenomena quite well explain much Haskell advocacy. Considering how massive an undertaking it is to learn the language and its Byzantinely-complex, PhD-theses-in-disguise libraries (each of which sports a zoo of custom operators) and how small the payoff is, it's unsurprising that those who take the plunge begin zealously encouraging others to do the same, lest their own investment have been for nothing. In a way it's like a conspiracy.

I will never, ever use Haskell in production because of its default evaluation strategy, the wrongness of which was tacitly conceded not long ago with the addition of the strictness pragma (which only works per-module) to GHC.

I think it's especially telling that its community skews so heavily towards this blogger/monad tutorial writer dilettante demographic rather than the D. Richard Hipp/Walter Bright 'actually gets real work done' demographic. I know which of the two I'd rather be in. Haskellers are even worse than Lispers in this regard. For the amount of noise about Haskell, you'd expect to see high-quality operating system kernels, IDEs, or RDMBSs written in it by now. Instead its killer apps are a tiling window manager, a document converter, and a DVCS so slow and corruption-prone even they avoid it in favor of Git.

> ... I am a bit lost

Google "cognitive dissonance" and the "sunk cost fallacy."