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#40

No, because Haskell is useless.

Q.E.D

#41

Therefore:

…otherwise it could be expressed entirely in Haskell.

#42

Write a Haskell kernel.

#43

Would either of these be sufficient?

#44

image

gets Haskell kernel
looks inside
it’s all C

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#45

What about a minimal model of an OS in (an earlier version of) Haskell?

#46

You and me both know that to flip a bit you will call C.

#47

…or maybe assembly language - either way:

…otherwise it could be expressed entirely in Haskell.

#48

Or it is simple and Haskell is infinitely complex.

#49

…you and I just showed (informally) twice that it isn’t. But Haskell isn’t the only declarative programming language - there’s also Prolog; maybe it will be less complicated to concisely and mathematically describe state in that language…

#50

Thank you for your detailed and nuanced response!

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#51

Not without using primitives.

I’m informally sure that flipping a bit with an instruction of a finite state machine with as many states as you got space for bits is simple.

Sorry (ok, maybe not but I’m being polite) for derailing.

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#52

So now that we’re back on-topic: why didn’t pragmatism work in 1978? Because if it did work, John Backus’s ACM Turing-Award lecture would surely have been about (some aspect of?) Fortran, rather than a “clarion call” for radical (at the time) change…

#53

I might be wrong for sure. Don’t people expect everyone in the community to be right all the time? Or maybe it’s expected to not say anything unless there is a strong evidence backing claims. If this is so, natural conversations would be too difficult, but I can take this as granted.

I don’t however see how the technical arguments work here. Backward compatibility was not a big concern yet, it breaks constantly for new versions of GHC. It was not a big concern when introducing a significantly more severe change “simplified subsumption” (that was made opt-in, not opt-out after that), and the story of backward compatibility is known to be controversial. If it’s the dot itself, this could be overcome by chosing a different syntax. I don’t mean it should have been so, the dot itself is valuable. But I don’t see how this is a so big problem. So I don’t find this specific case somehow different in the technical terms, and this makes me looking for other reasons. But maybe I’m not an attentive reader who interpreted that epic discussion on GitHub wrongly.

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#54

This is true for me too, but with a big caveat: I think the group of people who want to use Haskell is much bigger than the group of people who use Haskell (maybe 10x, to take a very rough guess) and the number of people who would want to use Haskell, if they were introduced to it in a way that appealed to them, is bigger still (maybe 100x, again extremely roughly).

If we made an effort to make Haskell more accessible to those groups then we could help them benefit from Haskell, and their contributions in turn would help Haskell! Such an effort would involve improvements to tooling and documentation, and fostering a software engineering culture within Haskell that is accessible to a wider range of people.

I think I agree with OP in this regard, although I differ in how I think the matter is best expressed and discussed.

6 Likes
#55

(I realised after posting that I’m replying to Tom, but this is really a reply to the whole thread.)

IMO, language adoption / “perceived practicality” is not really correlated to some language being “better” than another. It is almost always a function of the language’s ecosystem, though. That is, the number of available libraries for a given task, how well these are maintained and how well they are documented.

I recently attended a talk by Shiram Krishnamurthi, who said that it’s all about education. In his view, a successful ecosystem must be good at education as well.

Hence I would try to take Haskell-the-language out of the equation. There is no way Lang X can succeed if its proponents are bad at teaching others about it, or think that time is better spent explaining why “Lang X is better than Lang Y” and “you really just should try it to see”, because ultimately it is all about good teaching materials for Lang X and its best-in-class libraries.

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#56

Hmmmmm. It’s not as if anybody’s stopping people trying out Haskell. Maybe ~20 years ago Haskell was in obscurity, but these days I don’t think there’s any curious programmers who’ve not heard of Haskell.

A lot of programmers aren’t going to benefit from Haskell: if you’re churning out database-to-screen-to-keyboard-to-database applications in a rigid employer-dictated framework, on a 15-year-old application, what can Haskell teach you? Or the benefit will be ‘recreational programming’/hobby projects – in which case see paragraph 1.

I don’t see the point in talking about “contributions”. The continuing problem is there’s tiny capacity to make any changes to GHC or its tooling. Piling more people into the demand side will just make for more frustration. I note the people who are competent to make actual contributions (not me) are too busy to hang out on Discourse.

#57

Some of those people would massively benefit from Haskell. I know because I was one of them. And it’s not about what Haskell will teach (perhaps this is one of the mental blockers: “the benefit of Haskell is that it helps you reach enlightenment”) it’s that Haskell is a massively more pleasant language for churning out database-to-screen-to-keyboard-to-database applications in a rigid employer-dictated framework, on a 15-year-old application.

I’m not sure what this means. It seems obvious to me that more competent people in the ecosystem will lead to more progress on the things we all benefit from.

Could you elaborate? @sgraf is posting above you, for example. @mpilgrem maintains stack and participated in this thread. Many people who work on GHC, Cabal, stack, GHCup and HLS are here regularly. So I must be misinterpreting something in your comment.

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#58

Hugely disagree with this point and this logic.

First, why are we deciding for some unknown persons what will or will not be good for them? We should treat people we don’t know about as adult persons who can make decisions for themselves. If we are rational, we just can’t make such decisions: “there are people who would not benefit, so we should not do anything”. The best we can do and should do is making more opportunities for all, and those who need, will use these opportunities.

And yes, the more people in Haskell, the more benefit it is for all haskellers.

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#59

So what is something that has “mass appeal”, something that can be read from the side of a box at a computer shop?

…because these days, who doesn’t want to “get more stuff done” simultaneously? Moreover:

Exactly.

The choice of non-strict semantics by default, and consequently purity now places Haskell at an advantage over most other “step-by-step-by-step” languages, where historically parallelism and concurrency have been thoroughly muddled-up. But as the existence of ParaSail shows, nothing stops new parallel languages from appearing. So for Haskell to be synonymous with parallelism means taking the necessary measures now, while (most of) the rest of the competition are still deciding how to “add-on” purity e.g:

(…let alone non-strict semantics ;-)