Comment by ozataman
14 years ago
> This has always been my problem with Haskell; it is beautiful, but it is useless for hacking.
Don't confuse a lack of experience and skill with an advanced tool's (Haskell in this case) lack of practical value. It's one thing to say "Haskell takes a long time to become useful for the average person" and another to say "Haskell is useless for hacking (as in quick prototyping as I understand from your article)".
I, for one, can produce quick mock-ups and prototypes way faster in Haskell than in any other language I know; and I consider myself an advanced user of Ruby and Python. You need to, of course, absorb and internalize a large number of use cases and concepts in Haskell before you get to this point, but it is quite extraordinary once you're there. High expressiveness, modeling to fit the domain even for small, one-off tasks (thanks to algebraic data types) and many other elegant aspects all become second nature and really really fast once you're expert enough.
dons' slides come to mind as a presentation on a related topic if anyone's interested[1].
[1]: http://donsbot.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/semicolon.pdf
But that is I think OP's point, Haskell forces you to "model", versus something like scheme or python where you can just sling dicts around.
Haskell absolutely forces you to do a non-trivial amount of thinking up front, which is counter-productive when you're trying to throw something together in 10 minutes.
You can sling dicts around in Haskell too if you want to. The reason people don't is that the alternative is easier.
+100. That's one of the things I love about Haskell - it makes the "right" things easy and the "wrong" things hard.
You can sling dicts around in Haskell too if you want to. The reason people don't is that the alternative is easier.
This is extraordinary if it is true -- it would mean something in Haskell has succeeded in making the designed/intended "right way" in a programming language the "easy way."
I'm not so sure finding the right way to design a language/environment is right for a sole design focus anymore. A programming language/environment should be designed to unify and leverage the power of a community, in a way that elevates it above the level of "pop culture." (Where a pop culture is defined as one where the rate of change far outstrips the growth of actual value/knowledge.)
But, if I remember correctly, the haskell map is typed, isn't it?
In python you can mix the types of both keys and values in a single dict freely.
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