The concurrency and threading in Go just feels like magic compared to every other language. I'm a goroutine addict and I refuse to be rehabilitated.
Just from observations over the years, I don't think there's any other language quite like this, in terms of how things can end up happening in any thread.
I learned Haskell before that, and frankly the concurrency in Go feels similar, but is a definite downgrade due to the lack of STM.
You can implement channels and select using STM, so these don’t have to be in the standard library. And the contentious design choices like what happens when you close the channel twice can be your choice! And going from STM to managing mutexes is a definite downgrade in abstraction power.
The concurrency design in Haskell feels like true magic.
The concurrency design in Haskell is cool, though I gotta admit that I don't find it much fun to write.
It's not because the language is "hard". I remember when I first learned Haskell a million years ago I thought it was the coolest thing ever because I had never seen anyone work at that abstract of a level before, especially in a compiled language. I got to understand the theory well enough and I know how to write a program with it, but the entire language kind of feels slapped together to me. Every time I've written anything in Haskell, I feel like I have to do a million compiler extensions, or rely on third party libraries' liberal use of Template Haskell (e.g. Lens) to make the language feel anywhere near "modern".
Yes yes yes, I know this is a complaint about GHC, not "Haskell", but given that GHC is basically the only Haskell compiler that gets serious use I don't think it's weird to conflate the compiler and the language.
I honestly don't think that that's why the language is annoying though.
"Avoid success at all costs" has always meant (in my mind) to mean "we will prioritize doing things the 'right' way instead of doing things to appeal to corporations". That's fine, I'm all for doing things correctly, but I think a lot of Haskell's bullshit isn't because of that.
It's a common complaint but it's common for a reason: the fact that records couldn't contain the same field names was really stupid. Apparently in the 90's the Haskell devs couldn't fathom two different types both having a field called "ID" or "name". How does allowing multiple objects to have an overlapping field name affect purity? Plenty of other languages, some of which are even more mathy than Haskell, have managed to pull this off (e.g. TLA+). Could it be because records/structs are really just a shitty hack around tuples tacked onto the language? Yes, Lens fixed hat particular problem with Template Haskell, and now there's yet another GHC extension to more or less work around it, but doesn't change the fact that I think it was something actively bad and it wasn't because of "purity" reasons.
My interpretation is more that changes solely for the purpose of wider adoption were explicitly "out of scope" for the language. Warts aren't undesirable, but in a certain sense actively embraced in my reading of the slogan.
SamInTheShell · · focus · HN ↗
Just from observations over the years, I don't think there's any other language quite like this, in terms of how things can end up happening in any thread.
kccqzy · · focus · HN ↗
You can implement channels and select using STM, so these don’t have to be in the standard library. And the contentious design choices like what happens when you close the channel twice can be your choice! And going from STM to managing mutexes is a definite downgrade in abstraction power.
The concurrency design in Haskell feels like true magic.
tombert · · focus · HN ↗
It's not because the language is "hard". I remember when I first learned Haskell a million years ago I thought it was the coolest thing ever because I had never seen anyone work at that abstract of a level before, especially in a compiled language. I got to understand the theory well enough and I know how to write a program with it, but the entire language kind of feels slapped together to me. Every time I've written anything in Haskell, I feel like I have to do a million compiler extensions, or rely on third party libraries' liberal use of Template Haskell (e.g. Lens) to make the language feel anywhere near "modern".
Yes yes yes, I know this is a complaint about GHC, not "Haskell", but given that GHC is basically the only Haskell compiler that gets serious use I don't think it's weird to conflate the compiler and the language.
saghm · · focus · HN ↗
The slogan "avoid success at all costs" definitely is accurate for Haskell
tombert · · focus · HN ↗
"Avoid success at all costs" has always meant (in my mind) to mean "we will prioritize doing things the 'right' way instead of doing things to appeal to corporations". That's fine, I'm all for doing things correctly, but I think a lot of Haskell's bullshit isn't because of that.
It's a common complaint but it's common for a reason: the fact that records couldn't contain the same field names was really stupid. Apparently in the 90's the Haskell devs couldn't fathom two different types both having a field called "ID" or "name". How does allowing multiple objects to have an overlapping field name affect purity? Plenty of other languages, some of which are even more mathy than Haskell, have managed to pull this off (e.g. TLA+). Could it be because records/structs are really just a shitty hack around tuples tacked onto the language? Yes, Lens fixed hat particular problem with Template Haskell, and now there's yet another GHC extension to more or less work around it, but doesn't change the fact that I think it was something actively bad and it wasn't because of "purity" reasons.
saghm · · focus · HN ↗