The Downfall of Imperative Programming

[Paulo Pinto]

Well, all these guys seem to disagree with you about using 
Haskell in
real-world programming

http://corp.galois.com/
http://www.eaton.com/Eaton/index.htm
http://blog.tupil.com/


--
Paulo

On Thursday, 12 April 2012 at 11:04:06 UTC, James Miller wrote:
> * Russel Winder <russel at winder.org.uk> [2012-04-10 21:02:03 
> +0100]:
>
>> On Tue, 2012-04-10 at 21:22 +0200, Gour wrote:
>> [...]
>> > In any case, as it is often said, I got a feeling that 
>> > despite its
>> > potential cleanliness, the real-world Haskell code was not 
>> > so readable.
>> 
>> That probably comes down to familiarity and personal taste.
>> 
>> > By deploying some coding discipline, we tend to believe that 
>> > D can serve
>> > well as FP-language for the masses. :-)
>> 
>> Hummm... the really core issue is whether the language 
>> supports tail
>> call optimization.  Functional programming languages demand 
>> it, C, C++,
>> Java, Go, Python definitely don't have it, D...
>> 
>
> I used Haskell a bit a while back, and while I enjoyed using 
> it, and was
> quite capable of writing in proper functional style, I found 
> reasoning
> about the programs tedious and difficult. Due to the nature of
> "Everything is a function" (mostly), you end up with an 
> incredible
> amount of functions for the simplest tasks. And some of the 
> most common
> tasks in real-world programming, string processing and IO, are
> significantly more difficult in Haskell.
>
> Monads aren't a problem, the discussion of monads, by functional
> programmers is a problem. The moment some snobby functional 
> programmer
> comes along and starts talking about category theory and some 
> esoteric
> aspect of Type Algebra generalized of some field of Assholery, 
> most
> people's brains turn off. It gets worse when you go: "How does 
> this help
> read from a file" and they give you a long stare and start all 
> over
> again, I just want to know how to read from a goddamn file!
>
> I wish I could love Haskell, and for pure computer science, 
> it's fine,
> amazing even, but for real-world programming, it just doesn't 
> cut it.
> The concepts are too difficult and not explained well enough, 
> code
> rapidly becomes unreadable unless you maintain super-human 
> discipline
> and broken code is difficult to fix. Case in point is darcs, 
> which is a
> perfect application of real-word usage, and the GHC developers 
> are
> complaining of it being unstable, bloated and impossible to 
> fix, so they
> are moving to git (written in C no less).
>
> --
> James Miller