Re:Is Haskell really the language of geniuses and academia? ...
by verandaguy on Saturday August 20, 2022 @01:53AM
(#32529506)
That was the most memorable issue I had with Haskell; thinking back, other stuff that bugged me was some of the idioms needed to move between pure and impure code. You may be right though, it's something I should probably revisit. It's been a couple years and I did end up taking some of the lessons learned from Haskell into other languages (mostly not at a low level, though -- it's more that Haskell informed how to approach some higher-level design problems). Railway-oriented programming in particular stuck with me as a _great_ pattern that's consistently useful across languages.
I still think it's worth learning by anyone who's got the time for it.
The records problem is basically a small syntactical quirk. Undesirable, yes, but not what will make or break production software development.
Lenses solve some of that and much more. Lenses strictly improve on fields/records/getters/setters/etc. in any other language you know. In other words, they accomplish what they do and then some.
If that was your only problem with Haskell, then it might be one of your favourite languages if you get to know it again.