Why Haskell is beyond ready for Prime Time

http://intoverflow.wordpress.com/2009/01/13/why-haskell-is-beyond-ready-for-prime-time/

by raju • 18 years ago

51 99 18 years ago

intoverflow.wordpress.com

Advanced languages like Haskell will never reach Prime Time in the sense of the term because they're too challenging. Similar to the "Python Paradox," except that Python's easy to learn. There's a strange appeal (that we all still can relate to) that's led people to prefer simple junk like ColdFusion to better-designed, more useful languages over the years.

jimbokun2• 18 years ago

Object orientation eventually "won" in the market. Unfortunately, it was adopted by the general programming public in the form of Java, not Smalltalk.

It seems like functional programming is similarly "winning" as an idea. Anyone who thinks about programming much agrees that a language where you can't pass a function as a value, or construct functions at runtime, is pretty broken.

The question then, is whether Haskell is the new Smalltalk of functional programming, and what language will play the role of the functional programming Java.

wmf2• 18 years ago

Indeed; all functional languages are not alike. Haskell is not just functional, it's also lazy and has "weird" syntax. If functional programming is going to take off, I would expect to see it in the form of an eagerly-evaluated language with C-like syntax.

andreyf3• 18 years ago

The question then, is [...] what language will play the role of the functional programming Java.

JavaScript?

time_management13• 18 years ago

Multi-core concurrency is going to kill OO. FP will resurge in the 2010s among good programmers, spreading out to the "vital 25%" (who are, right now, mostly upper-tier Java developers) rather than being restricted to an elite 3-5%.

11ren7• 18 years ago

I think part of Lisp's success was that academics liked it, so when they did clever stuff, it was related to Lisp. Today, it seems that academics like Haskell (is it true?), and so when they think of clever stuff, it will be related to Haskell.

The "Java of FP" could be C# or F# (although Microsoft isn't willing to go multi-platform, so that might stop it becoming "successful", by many definitions).

But honestly, I don't think there is a powerful enough vector available to carry FP. C had Unix. Java had the net. A novel way to think about the next "Java of FP" is to think of what vector could matter, and then what FP language is well-placed to be carried by it.

Mobile phones are all I can think of at the moment, but no FP has come of it; the netbooks (which are becoming phones) are plain ol' PCs; and the iPhone runs Objective-C (doesn't it?). What's the next IT revolution?

Actually, time_management is right: the next IT revolution is clearly multi-core.

EDIT: I keep hearing about Intel's CUDA for multicore on GPU's, but it's pretty much the anti-FP, being "recursion free" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA#Limitations

11ren7• 18 years ago

I think Haskell is intellectually challenging in a way that isn't needed to get the job done. The one exception is for proving things (which so far is not practical - but it's cool, and might become practically useful, one day).

Don't get me wrong: I like the intellectual challenge, and I especially like the Haskell community - they are nice people, excited about what they're doing, very helpful, and just not interested in putting down other languages - and I think there is real beauty in Haskell. It's like a branch of mathematics.

Disclosure: I'm terrible at Haskell's intellectual challenge. It makes me feel stupid. I hate that.

eelco3• 18 years ago

Well, I'll be glad as hell if Haskell is as popular in 4.5 years from now as Python is currently (pg's article about the Python Paradox was written August 2004). Hmm, I think I'll even be glad if Haskell will ever be as popular as Python was 4.5 years ago :)

gaius• 18 years ago

It won't be "real" until there's a batteries-included, commercially supported ActiveHaskell on activestate.com.

OCaml (in the guise of F#) is the most likely mainstream FP language.

sctb2• 18 years ago

The author is asserting that Haskell, the language and the tools, is ready for `Prime Time'. There is also a sustainable community of smart and enthusiastic Haskell hackers.

The developer mainstream may not be quite ready for Haskell, but Haskell is ready for them.

EDIT: Meant to be in reply to thomasmallen: "Advanced language like Haskell..."

stcredzero• 18 years ago

Is the developer mainstream any better than it used to be?

bpyne• 18 years ago

I think it is or will be soon enough. The internet made communication between geographically disparate developers so much easier. It's become mature enough that there are sites now where curious developers can congregate and exchange ideas.

When I started in the field the internet wasn't on the radar of businesses. Email accounts were uncommon never mind blog sites. Most book stores didn't carry books on academic topics. Besides, the wave of OO was just starting to gather so 9 out of 10 books were on OO or C++ or both.

Developers are now exposed to more and can share code and techniques. More complex problems are shared now causing curious developers to stretch their limits.

The largest problem I see now with adoption of Haskell is the us/them mentality of field trained developers vs. academically trained ones. I'm in the former group. While not all academically trained developers code/design well, the median one has been exposed to a wider range of coding problems and tools. Our ability to share ideas and problems on the internet levels that playing field if we let it.

In short, yes, mainstream developers are ready for Haskell/Lisp/OCaml/etc. We need to get over the "that's just for academics" mentality. They are tools, thought out by people with lots of brains and time on their hands, to solve problems. The only thing holding us back is our mentality.

smanek• 18 years ago

Being able to search for functions/libraries by type signatures is very, very useful.

sctb2• 18 years ago

I completely agree, and I believe that this is something unique to Haskell+Hoogle+Hackage.

silentbicycle8• 18 years ago

Though thinking about functions/libraries in terms of their type signatures is, in itself, a pretty new concept to a lot of people.

time_management13• 18 years ago

I remember, about a week into my exposure to Ocaml, asking what a functor was. "It's a function from a module to a module."

My response was along the lines of, What? It turns out, though, that Ocaml functors are really cool and can provide some of the functionality of Haskell's type classes.

andreyf3• 18 years ago

Even more useful: searching for functions/libraries with a unit test?

alexfarran• 18 years ago

Kind of like Squeak Smalltalk's method finder http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1916

And a reimplementation in Ruby http://www.nobugs.org/developer/ruby/method_finder.html

time_management13• 18 years ago

Indeed. Type signatures mean that the code is naturally self-documenting.

My stance on the static/dynamic controversy is that static typing becomes a win as the amount of time spent reading others' code increases. A single programmer is probably going to be more productive in Lisp than in ML. (I don't know enough about Haskell to speak for it.) On the other hand, if I were choosing a base language for a team of 10 people who would all be editing the same code, I'd most likely choose one that's statically typed. Static typing enforces interfaces and allows the compiler to detect a decent share of bugs as well as most code breaks.

anamax4• 18 years ago

> Indeed. Type signatures mean that the code is naturally self-documenting.

Really? Knowing that a function takes two ints and returns a function is documentation?

And to think that I spend my time worrying about what a function does.

anamax4• 18 years ago

> Being able to search for functions/libraries by type signatures is very, very useful.

I can't remember the last time that I wanted to find a function that took two ints and returned a function.

I can remember the last time I wanted a function that did a particular operation.

11ren7• 18 years ago

Haskell has algebraic data types, which are much more expressive than conventional types. You can see that from his example. Of course, the types don't define the functionality, but they narrow it down much more quickly than the ints of C and Java (similar to google ranking of search results).

Python documentation, in contrast, seems to downplay (read: hide) the return type! It's not helpful to me (maybe I'm doing it wrong, or just not used to it). For example: http://docs.python.org/library/httplib.html#httplib.HTTPConn...

brl10• 18 years ago

Rather than writing blog articles touting how great your favorite language is for general purpose programming you should write some code.

When you have more non-trivial applications written in Haskell than a Haskell compiler and a DVCS it will be a lot more credible to talk about it being ready for 'Prime Time'.

sharkbrainguy• 18 years ago

Like a window manager? http://xmonad.org/

brl10• 18 years ago

I like xmonad, but it's still just a 500 line ultra-minimalist window manager.

Students in introductory programming classes write programs longer than that.

Get back to me when you've implemented KDE, Aqua, or Aero in Haskell.

prakash• 18 years ago

Jeff Polakow: Is Haskell Ready for Everyday Computing?

http://cufp.galois.com/2008/slides/PolakowJeff.pdf

eelco3• 18 years ago

I'll give the same reply as was given in the comment thread of the article, which you apparently didn't read.

http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/pkg-list.html

brl10• 18 years ago

Hasn't changed since I last looked at it. Still a big clusterfuck of esoteric math libraries, wrappers for useful things written in other (practical) languages, and a handful of half finished clones of libraries and applications first written 10 or 20 years ago in C.

andreyf3• 18 years ago

Rather than writing blog articles...

Why not do both? Preaching the Good Word can go hand-in-hand with practicing it.

tptacek3• 18 years ago

Because you're spending credibility.

patio11• 18 years ago

Amen to that.

You can even have very broad definitions of "non-trivial": it used to be received gospel on one programming board I frequent that Java was a terrible choice for a downloadable application. If you tried it your users would abandon you in the middle of their 120 terabyte download, your application would win awards for poor non-native design, and it would take approximately seven years to boot the JVM.

Then I made a few tens of thousands of dollars with Bingo Card Creator. (Which is written in Java. Further frustrating my efforts to win geek cred, the UI is in Swing.)

We don't hear much about the impossibility of making money with downloadable Java applications these days.

Why Haskell is beyond ready for Prime Time

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