There is this memo video of S. P. Jones that famously says "Haskell is Useless". I love Haskell, but I wished it was universal like C, C++, JavaScript, Rust, and C#. By that I mean: It could be used to create apps for desktop, mobile, and web. JavaScript can be used to do so many things like power the entire web, be on node and let anyone create cli and share the code with web, and mobile through React Native, on desktop with Electron and its alike things, it lets you do plugins for god knows how many things, it lets you write things for the GNOME Shell... C and C++ are perhaps behind everything in the world and string theory finally gets seen will see they are written in C. And they can be compiled to Web and almost everything in the world. Rust is a placeholder for the two, and C# reinvented itself when it saw Mono and now works even in the browser. Each time I see Haskell I wonder what else can I do rather than creating CLI apps, and it makes me choose something else that grants me more code reuse and interesting applications.
If I could have a vision for Haskell, it was for it to be useful. Academic research and making compilers is cool, a few cli things here and there are cool too, but why can't we build music players and game engines and flutters and web pages with it? The language is way more elegant and beautiful than all the JS/C like languages out there and I really wished I could use it for the things I did. I'm aware of Servant/Yesod/IHP/Miso/Reflex for web, GTK/Monomer for desktop, TidalCycles for music, SDL/gloss for games, and various FFI/plugin, but none of them feel as coherent and worked on as the others, none of them are polished. Haskell surely needs good DX, but it also needs really better reasons for existing.
> There is this memo video of S. P. Jones that famously says "Haskell is Useless".
I think that is an unfair characterization of the video and the intent of Haskell's co-creator, based on the rest of your comment. Simon Peyton Jones makes a graph with two dimensions, useful/useless and safe/unsafe. The question he gets at is: how can one distinguish between effectful and effect-free computations in a programming language? He proceeds to characterize most useful languages as unsafe, and Haskell as useless but safe. He then spends the majority of the video talking about how useful languages are becoming safer, and at the same time how Haskell must become useful.
It sounds like it needs foundational libraries? Or is it something else. For example, almost everything I write requires one or more of:
- Embedded toolchain and/or HAL/register map for my MCU family or CPU arhitecture
- A GUI library and/or basic I/O interaction library (keyboard/mouse to start)
- A GPU interaction library
- A web framework (Not going to roll my own DB interface, auth, user system, router, template system etc)
(Etc). I.e., some core library which handles the drudgery I can build my application on. If this is what you're getting at, this suggests a plan of attack!
RE the debugging experience in Haskell: we recently wrote a post about bringing live run-time debugging to our Haskell VR compositor: https://simulavr.com/blog/debug-hud/
Live step-through debugging and interactivity we think is pretty underrated in the Haskell ecosystem.
hasufell has been a wonderful person in haskell land. hes got very clear headed ideas about stuff and so forth.
also the stuff i can now build in haskell with computer aid is epic. earlier this week i stood up what i believe is one of the/ if not the: best step file format reader writer on like every axis. some c ones are 20-30 percent faster on the largest possible cad assemblies i could try out.
an important axis that folks neglect to consider: the main way llms are getting scaled up for better coding is metric megatons of reinforcement learning traces, and type checking thats fancy gives a cheaper and faster training feedback loop.
with an llm as a sortah insane manic intern im looking over the shoulder, so to speak, im able to build the apis and designs i can see but cant type anywhere near the same scale. but i can specify the keystones for the exact designs quite compactly and then the agent kinda acts as a compiler inhave to correct and iterate running
While I agree compile time is a big issue, I think the focus should really be on incremental build, because considering how much work the Haskell compiler has to do, it is expected to be quite slow on full build.
But incremental build has no reason to be slow, if the scope is as fine-grained as the function and type level.
> we are going to build the best onboarding experience in the programming language ecosystem
> This can only be done if we commit to unix principles
> write programs that do one thing and do it well
Rust is so approachable because Cargo does not subscribe to "do one thing".
In fact Cargo does a bunch of things. Which is very convenient for newcomers, because they only need to learn one thing instead of a bunch (and how they interact).
The same holds for a GUI like a file explorer with buttons and interactions like drag / drop or marquee select, which is a bunch simpler than chaining 3 programs together to delete 30 old files and move some folder into a subdirectory.
It also explains why the most successful tools within the land of Unix philosophy are stuff like AWK, which really don't just do one thing. Or why PowerShell is less usable than GNU. Or why Emacs is an 'operating system'.
It's also a reason why the installation experience for Haskell is so bad: there are a bunch of programs and users don't know where to start and what they need.
> Cabal and Stack: which one should I install?
> We recommend installing both.
One thing and one thing well.
Atleast it seems they've added a combined installer for these tools since the last time I've checked.
I disagree. About a decade ago I made some tooling to extract and analyse code from Haskell packages. That's easier said than done, given the use of pre-processors, TemplateHaskell, language extensions affecting the syntax/grammar, using external files like `.cabal` to specify such pre-processors/extensions, etc.
I went through several iterations, to get something that I could throw arbitrary packages at from Hackage, GitHub, etc. The result was a hacky mess containing a GHC plugin to dump Core code, a library to dynamically generate and evaluate strings of Nix to handle dependencies, shell scripts that piped `:t` commands through GHCi, and so on.
It was annoying, not because of the effort involved (I was doing weird, bespoke things; so it's no surprise it needed weird, bespoke code to be written); but because all of the functionality I needed already existed, just buried deep inside GHC/Cabal/etc.
Admittedly the GHC API has gotten much better in recent years; but there's no way the developers of "one tool to rule them all" can predict all of the different things that users will want it to do. Indeed, it's probably wise for such tools to avoid supporting/maintaining particularly weird/niche uses!
Having a collection of tools instead, which "do one thing and do it well", side-steps that problem entirely: users with weird use-cases are empowered to plug things together in a way that suits their needs, without needing the devs to add special features/flags just for them (or maintain their own forks with such flags, etc.)
To be fair, that’s a general problem on NixOS (and other OSes), and one that tools like devenv have tried to solve. You can take what’s included with OS packages, but then you’re stuck with whatever version that is.
yeah ive never heard anyone say they like doing productive coinduction in lean. agda almost has a story, but the ergonomics and semantics arent trivial.
If I could have a vision for Haskell, it was for it to be useful. Academic research and making compilers is cool, a few cli things here and there are cool too, but why can't we build music players and game engines and flutters and web pages with it? The language is way more elegant and beautiful than all the JS/C like languages out there and I really wished I could use it for the things I did. I'm aware of Servant/Yesod/IHP/Miso/Reflex for web, GTK/Monomer for desktop, TidalCycles for music, SDL/gloss for games, and various FFI/plugin, but none of them feel as coherent and worked on as the others, none of them are polished. Haskell surely needs good DX, but it also needs really better reasons for existing.
I think that is an unfair characterization of the video and the intent of Haskell's co-creator, based on the rest of your comment. Simon Peyton Jones makes a graph with two dimensions, useful/useless and safe/unsafe. The question he gets at is: how can one distinguish between effectful and effect-free computations in a programming language? He proceeds to characterize most useful languages as unsafe, and Haskell as useless but safe. He then spends the majority of the video talking about how useful languages are becoming safer, and at the same time how Haskell must become useful.
https://youtu.be/iSmkqocn0oQ
Haskell can 100% be used to create all of these kinds of apps.
Live step-through debugging and interactivity we think is pretty underrated in the Haskell ecosystem.
also the stuff i can now build in haskell with computer aid is epic. earlier this week i stood up what i believe is one of the/ if not the: best step file format reader writer on like every axis. some c ones are 20-30 percent faster on the largest possible cad assemblies i could try out.
an important axis that folks neglect to consider: the main way llms are getting scaled up for better coding is metric megatons of reinforcement learning traces, and type checking thats fancy gives a cheaper and faster training feedback loop.
with an llm as a sortah insane manic intern im looking over the shoulder, so to speak, im able to build the apis and designs i can see but cant type anywhere near the same scale. but i can specify the keystones for the exact designs quite compactly and then the agent kinda acts as a compiler inhave to correct and iterate running
But incremental build has no reason to be slow, if the scope is as fine-grained as the function and type level.
It just didn't get anything like the adoption that Solidity had at the time.
> we are going to build the best onboarding experience in the programming language ecosystem
> This can only be done if we commit to unix principles > write programs that do one thing and do it well
Rust is so approachable because Cargo does not subscribe to "do one thing". In fact Cargo does a bunch of things. Which is very convenient for newcomers, because they only need to learn one thing instead of a bunch (and how they interact).
The same holds for a GUI like a file explorer with buttons and interactions like drag / drop or marquee select, which is a bunch simpler than chaining 3 programs together to delete 30 old files and move some folder into a subdirectory.
It also explains why the most successful tools within the land of Unix philosophy are stuff like AWK, which really don't just do one thing. Or why PowerShell is less usable than GNU. Or why Emacs is an 'operating system'.
It's also a reason why the installation experience for Haskell is so bad: there are a bunch of programs and users don't know where to start and what they need.
> Cabal and Stack: which one should I install? > We recommend installing both.
One thing and one thing well.
Atleast it seems they've added a combined installer for these tools since the last time I've checked.
I went through several iterations, to get something that I could throw arbitrary packages at from Hackage, GitHub, etc. The result was a hacky mess containing a GHC plugin to dump Core code, a library to dynamically generate and evaluate strings of Nix to handle dependencies, shell scripts that piped `:t` commands through GHCi, and so on.
It was annoying, not because of the effort involved (I was doing weird, bespoke things; so it's no surprise it needed weird, bespoke code to be written); but because all of the functionality I needed already existed, just buried deep inside GHC/Cabal/etc.
Admittedly the GHC API has gotten much better in recent years; but there's no way the developers of "one tool to rule them all" can predict all of the different things that users will want it to do. Indeed, it's probably wise for such tools to avoid supporting/maintaining particularly weird/niche uses!
Having a collection of tools instead, which "do one thing and do it well", side-steps that problem entirely: users with weird use-cases are empowered to plug things together in a way that suits their needs, without needing the devs to add special features/flags just for them (or maintain their own forks with such flags, etc.)
If I'm on NixOS, should I be installing via ghcup, stack, or nix?
I recall wanting to use Haskell packages that were only available in Nix, but nobody had bothered to make just a normal package.
>Languages
>Haskell 81.9%
https://leangineer.com/blog/realworld-in-lean/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50088748
though i have thought about it.