Why Learning to Code Is So Hard – and Why It Gets Easier

Re:Why Learning to Code Is So Hard – and Why It Gets Easier by codewright on Tuesday November 06, 2012 @05:07PM (#4751079)

>It Gets Easier

Yes, except for Haskell. I did a fair amount of CL back in the day and I'm relatively comfortable with Clojure now...but Haskell is pain incarnate.

BSDM, pain, discipline, whips, and chains programming language of the century. That crown was stolen from Ada and covered in thorns and lambdas.

GHC: BWAHAHAHA! Infinite Types? YOU FOOL! THAT IS VERBOTEN!

On a more serious note, Haskell is fantastic until the moment you exceed its sweet spot. Once you leave that realm you have entered the world of pain, functional reactive programming, monad transformers, and true horror. The slope for "affordances" compares poorly with Lisp's knack for letting you spin a DSL or solution to a problem that reduces pain and improves expression. The laziness and space leaks are an unnecessary horror too. I'd rather something like a more powerful OCaml, given the choice.

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Re:Why Learning to Code Is So Hard – and Why It Gets Easier by michaelochurch on Tuesday November 06, 2012 @07:38PM (#4751620)

Haskell is painful for "real" programming because people have been doing "real" programming in C-like languages for decades, whereas the state of the art for a lazily-evaluated, extremely statically-typed functional language influenced by category theory is still a bit immature.

Haskell is a great language, but I understand hesitancy on taking it into production.

Clojure and Scala are a joy to work with. Scala's problem is Java-culture hangover but the language itself is excellent (and may be what you're looking for in "a more powerful OCaml", although I'm not sure I'd describe it quite that way).

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Re:Why Learning to Code Is So Hard – and Why It Gets Easier by codewright on Tuesday November 06, 2012 @07:55PM (#4751678)

>and may be what you're looking for in "a more powerful OCaml"

Scala is neat, but the time I couldn't get sbt to run because it kept running out of memory, after having had no trouble with it for months, I decided it was time to rm -rf my scala install.

I have a lot more background with Clojure (Lisps, really) anyway. I'd enjoy something with a more informative/helpful type system but Scala and Haskell are too broken, irritating, and unproductive for me.

For people like KirinDave who've crested that mountain with Haskell, more power to them.

I have to ship product ASAP and don't have time to wrangle with parser combinators just to read some XML though.

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Re:Why Learning to Code Is So Hard – and Why It Gets Easier by evincarofautumn on Tuesday November 06, 2012 @07:41PM (#4751634)

What have you used Haskell for? My experiences learning and using Haskell professionally have been nothing but pleasant, especially for DSLs. It’s been difficult at times to wrap my head around a new concept, sure, but sometimes you just have to work through it. That’s how programming is. I will grant you, though, that GHC’s strictness analysis is sometimes a bit too conservative, so I have had problems with memory usage in the past.

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