verttii

But on the other hand, it's been hard to put my finger on the tangible benefits of all that time spent on Haskell. I'm worried that I end up going deep into that rabbit hole without really benefiting from it.

I'm just like you. I use Elixir for anything serious and Haskell for personal or small scale projects.

The way I see it is that Haskell abstracts away the runtime considerations. You spend the majority of your time modeling your business domain in Haskell. Or rather, retrofitting your business model into Haskell's type system.

In Elixir, in contrast, you spend the majority of your time building systems, in other words on runtime problems. All the tooling and even the whole OTP revolves around this. For anything that runs on the web, this is a major benefit compared to Haskell.

This kinds of harsh yet legitimate criticism puts me off from spending more time on the notoriously steep Haskell learning curve.

Unfortunately, without concrete examples it's hard to grasp what features you really mean.

I think declarative is a paradigm, a way of thinking and reasoning about code, rather than a means to an end. Declarative code would obviously raise the abstraction level (as it hides implementation details that you produce with imperative code). I don't see how imperative code would hold an equal abstraction power.

As for ADTs and the like, these are very basic features used all over Haskell code, combined with pattern matching. There are much more advanced abstraction concepts that are used all over Haskell libraries.

I'm sure C++ has good facilities for abstraction. However, as it lacks many of the very advanced abstractions that Haskell has, I find it far fetched that C++ could be described as an equally high level language as the likes of Haskell. From what I understand, that's not even the intention of C++ to begin with.

Btw thanks for that reference to Mark Dominus, seems like interesting stuff!

Not sure what all that sunshine has done so far about those concentration camps in Xinjiang and possibly elsewhere too. I'd say just about nothing. The communist party seems rather immune to criticism.

Franky, HK's struggle looks hopeless to me.

Forgive my ignorance, but how can C++ programs be easily as high level as Haskell, which is declarative, garbage collected and curried by default? Does C++ even have algebraic data types, not to mention more advanced stuff like GADTs etc. that are incorporated in Haskell?

I haven't been able to get exposure to a language that is comparable in abstraction power with Haskell, except for DSLs.

But what can we do? Invade China for what they're doing in their own city?

Nobody is waging war against China over HK. There may be blood shed but that'll be the HK locals', not any foreign nation. I don't see how this could anyhow escalate beyond HK.

China can hate the USA as much as they want but from all I can see they have no intentions on waging war with the US over something as minor as HK is for them.

Though what could we do about it?

To be honest there's really not much anyone is willing to do for HK. Particularly the European nations are doing everything to avoid provoking China anyhow.

Look at how almost no one is willing to even acknowledge Taiwan's independence in fear of Chinese reaction. Unfortunately, HK's case is much more hopeless than Taiwan's.

I don't think you're wrong in reasoning that you would learn new beneficial concepts by picking up new less mainstream languages that pioneer these concepts.

I've invested some time in picking up Haskell and it's been worthwhile personally. When you know C, Java/(some OOP lang) and Haskell, everything else sort of falls in between. Ultimately makes your journey easier as a developer.

I feel you're unfairly comparing Haskell to the likes of C/C++ that it's not really a rival with. Haskell is a (very) high level language, not a procedural language to build systems on.

A more appropriate comparison would be with commonly used high level languages such as Java and Python. The comparison here is meaningful because you'd build similar software with them as you would with Haskell.

I really doubt it's that. Probably more to do with how little sunshine there is over the winter (which is long and cold).

But on the other hand, any meaningful comparisons get harder and less relevant for us if we use a time span of the past 150 years. I don't know if it really even matters that much that most companies die eventually. They're still producing lots of value right now. While Nokia is certainly not doing particularly well nowadays despite having a long and partially very successful history.

Edit: year

But even Linux was ultimately developed in USA. So was/is Unity. I don't know if Linux would've ever been the success it is had Linus Torvalds stayed in Finland developing it.

I'd hope we would have a big list of recent examples of major innovations from the Nordics but unfortunately nearly all the major digital products or innovations seem to be decades old. I can't think of almost any globally really promising Finnish digital startup right now.

> So your complaint is that Nordic countries try to make give everyone a good standard of living rather than creating poverty so a few more millionaires can become billionaires?

That's putting words into my mouth. I'm not complaining, merely observing. You're free to want more socialism, nobody is stopping you. I'm not saying one system is better than the other, they all have their own merits.

USA attracts top talent with top salaries, these are the people who are prepared to work hard and expect to be compensated well for that. They understand it's a sacrifice and they're willing to make it. Working willingly hard for a high compensation is not what I'd describe as exploitation.

Such a person in a Nordic country is working hard yet not compensated well for it. I don't see that as a better outcome for them and neither do they - that's why they emigrate to the USA. It's hardly relevant for building their own lives that there's some poor people living elsewhere in the USA.

In all fairness the Vietnamese had among the most battle-trained armies of the time, with massive manpower, enough of weaponry and extreme determination. Plus a difficult terrain. Equipment-wise they had infantry weapons, artillery, air force, aerial defense...

HK has maybe a difficult terrain?

The people in HK have no training in any form of warfare, guerilla or not. They're just not mentally nor physically equipped to conduct any sort of warfare, especially against a superior power like China.

I doubt China ultimately cares about loss of face.

Hehe yes the Haskell community certainly suffers from the dynamics you just described.

I guess my problem with TS ADTs is just that they're done with the TS primitives whereas they could be true first class citizens. But such a feature may be too hard to swallow for your typical JS developer whose first introduction to types is Typescript.

Btw can you elaborate on that Enum with ADTs? Or did you mean that you use Enums with switch-case? I use it too and find it one of the best bits of TS.

it's of both. Nokia was heavily constrained by the Finnish labor laws and working culture.

I agree with what you said. All these things compound and have multiplied effects. It's hard to blame a single factor like working hours when the underlying reasons for even that are cultural, political, geographical, historical etc.

Ok I'm used to considering only Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland as Nordic countries. They're also the only members of the Nordic council.

Estonia I've always just considered a Baltic country, which I suppose is accurate as well. Not that these definitions really matter anyway.

In contrast, if USA is not performing better then why are most of the digital innovations of US origin? Why do like half of the world's tech billionaires live in Silicon Valley? While Finland has maybe 1?

The Scandinavian countries focus on leveling the playing field for everyone. It allows the less privileged to build a good life, but it also hinders the most ambitious ones. Whereas USA is happy to focus on the extremes, allowing places like Silicon Valley to flourish.

We can argue endlessly whichever is better for the society, but professionals often choose the place to live based on what is best for them, not what political model some place runs on.

Yep, that's much of the reason. The whole ecosystem is just incredibly well developed over there.

Estonia is certainly performing well. But since it's so tiny it's really hard to compare against a giant like USA. Although much of the same problem applies to Nordics.

We use Google, Facebook, Youtube, Snapchat, Whatsapp, Apple - all American products. Whereas the Nordic countries produce very few major digital innovations used globally.

Also, I didn't know Estonia was a Nordic country.

Interesting, since New Zealand is in many ways comparable with Finland.

In Finland the tax rate for $100K USD would be 41.3% on average. The common consumption tax is 24% (VAT). On top of that, certain goods like alcohol, gas, cars, could have additional goods specific tax that could be well over 100%.

Unemployment stands at I think 6.6%.

Well just dropping a link to a news article or a study wouldn't really change things. If you look at who's the one producing major digital innovations it's still USA. Sure the Nordic countries are smaller but it's hard to compete against countries like USA with well educated people with strong work ethic when you're pushing in half the hours.

Sweden sure is doing well with digital innovations but can't say that the rest of the Nordics are performing equally as well. USA still has Silicon Valley which outperforms every other region in the world.

I guess it depends on what you compare with. If you're coming from Java or the like, surely TS does not feel particularly verbose.

However, coming from a truly terse language like Haskell you'll just feel TS is too verbose and not very elegant. TS is the most verbose and least elegant of the languages I'm personally using, on par with Dart.

ADTs not only feel dirty because they're not first class citizens (you build them with the TS primitives by adding a discriminating union key) but also somewhat useless since you don't have pattern matching.

Although pattern matching would not be a trivial problem to solve in TS. It could be solved with the compiler, however, you'd still have to hack the compiler API quite a bit too and TS doesn't even support integrating custom extensions with a config file like Babel does.

Btw thanks for pointing me to that ts-purify, it looks good!