Re: Have you read SICP

Why should I believe you, or follow a link from someone in their first 10 posts? Why is that book worth reading? What does SICP stand for?

Hmm, at least the link seems to be honest (pointing where it appears to point).

Thanks.

I’m a big fan of OCaml and other ML derivative languages, ie. fast and useful functional programming that’s very practical. There are some real problems with Haskell which make it less than useful as a real programming language.

Significant whitespace. It’s not just very difficult to understand how the whitespace works (far more so than Python, where it’s merely annoying), but it also makes it almost near impossible to automatically generate Haskell code, which is what we do in libguestfs.

The IO monad. Most Haskell examples use the IO monad, which serializes everything, making the code the same as more ordinary languages. The disadvantage is that monads are obscure and hard to understand. The advantage is .. unclear: your code is all still serialized, mostly, as well as being slow because of the overhead, so it’s not clear what the point is.

Unexpressive FFI. After dealing with a lot of FFIs I think I’m qualified to talk about this one. Haskell’s is terrible: The documentation is obscure verging on bad. The examples are rare (for anything that’s more complex than calling “sin”). There’s a great deal of brokenness in major features, eg. passing or returning structures. A lot of stuff is simply not possible without delving into the depths of compilers. It would have been much better to define a C API and write FFIs in C.

Laziness .. should not be the default. It’s not how any real computers work, or have ever worked, or are likely to work in the future.

Lack of optional/labelled args. Everyone else has them. Haskell has a huge hack. (If you try to implement this huge hack in reality you’ll see it’s not practical if you have a large number of functions that want optional args).

Also I get the impression from reading online that Haskell is widely studied and often pimped, but not used very much in reality.