In another life I will be a Haskell programmer
replies(6):
In any other language I've used (barring maybe Ada) that is a refactoring that would take at least days, if not weeks, to manually track down all the places it interacts with the system directly or indirectly, because mixing e.g. int with long long is not a type error.
In Haskell, I change the type and the compiler spits out a list of locations that needs to change. This is repeated for a few iterations until all transitive interactions are worked out. Done!
I should really learn Rust. Or Zig. I tried Nim (best of both worlds, Python-esque code that compiles to C!), but it wasn’t nearly as fast as my Python + C for my specific use case.
I've written low thousands of lines of Haskell. Similar to mikojan, I love Haskell in theory, but ended up not enjoying it as much in practice.
1. The multitude of string-y types. I end up converting between String, Text, Lazy Text, ByteString, Lazy ByteString, and I forget what else. Each library wants me to pass in a specific string type, and each other library returns a different string type. LLMs are good at this, also for a while I had a ton of helper functions to convert between any two string types. Still, perhaps there's a better way?
2. The error messages. I come from Elm, so I'm spoiled. Yes, I understand a language with HKTs will never have as nice error messages. Yes, LLMs are pretty good at explaining GHC error messages.
3. The stdlib. Haskell gets a lot of credit for safety, but a `head` blows up instead of returning a `Maybe`. I know there are other - safer - preludes, but I don't know how to choose between them. I don't know how using a different prelude would impact my projects.
I feel like my next step is either towards Idris, with its polished standard library (and dependent types baked into the language!), or towards something simpler and more Elm-like (Gleam perhaps, or Roc). But if you can sell me on Haskell, I'm all ears!
However, if you decide to start learning, the path is hard, especially if you come from a non-computer-science background like me. I attempted to learn Haskell twice; I bounced off the first time, quite hard, and didn't try again for years.
What worked for me is a combination of two things:
* Having a goal in mind, that has nothing with the choice of language. For me, it was building a personal website
* The book Haskell Programming from First Principles [0]
and if you have more questions, reach out.
Yes, yes, that's exactly what my encounters with Haskell looked like. The last one is ~1k lines of code backend for a personal project. I feel that's about as much as I could manage at this point.
> The book Haskell Programming from First Principles
That book is getting recommended all the time! I'm concerned if it's perhaps a little too basic for me. (I understand monads, monad transformers, have some notion of final tagless and free monad. Yet I get perpetually confused by various relatively simple things.)
I guess what I'm missing is haskell-language-server to help me a little. Here I'm confused about the interplay between `haskell-stack` (which is in Debian repos and which I think I'd like to use), ghcup, cabal, and haskell-language-server.