> This being said, Haskell does have something in it that encourages one to design a ballistic algebra that runs in the type system before even pointing a gun at one's foot.
Haskell is not even a total language, so type system doesn't magically divert gun from your feet. You can easily prove False in Haskell (there's a Prelude function for doing this!), enough said. And if you want types keep your feet safe, it's possible of course, at a _great_ cost, and not in Haskell.
Re:What Is Good About Haskell?
by antisemiotic on Thursday October 03, 2019 @06:55PM
(#21153124)
I was referencing an old joke; that Haskell programmers allegedly spend so much time polishing their types that they never get around to actually write anything useful.
I don't like the "simple language means understandable code" argument being thrown around like it was some obvious fact. I'm currently working on a project whose major component is a byzantine home-grown message passing framework written in pretty much Java-in-C++ (old school OO with liberal use of shared pointers. Not that I would call C++ in any form "simple", but I do think that C++ without template magic is simpler than Haskell with GHC magic, or, say, any Lisp with a lot of macros). Maybe it's a case of grass being greener on the other side, but I'd gladly take a monad transformer stack or a DSL written in Lisp macros over doing the same song and a dance over and over again just to implent a tiny new functionality, or trying to deduce the logic from someone else's sea of boilerplate.
I mean, taking this logic to extreme, one could say that code written in assembly is easy to understand: it's adding a value to EAX now, then it jumps over there...
This being said, Haskell does have something in it that encourages one to design a ballistic algebra that runs in the type system before even pointing a gun at one's foot.