Simon Peyton Jones - Haskell is useless

What people said

ReleaseCandidat · 2024-06 · Recommendation

That must of course be "Haskell is useless" [VIDEO] But apart from that, his enthusiasm can even make the mseemingly most boring topic interesting. I'd personally start either at "the story of Haskell" Escape from the Ivory Tower [LINK] Or something more recent, about Epic's Verse [LINK]

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ernst_klim · 2023-10 · Recommendation

These are two issues, which a theoretically orthogonal but in practice not so much. These are known as soundness and completeness. A good talk on topic [1] Rust will reject a lot of sound programs, and that's a huge performance hit. You are hitting the incompleteness wall with multiple mutable borrowing, closures in structures are a huge source of pain as well. And usually the answer from the community is "use handlers instead of pointers", but this gives you, surprise surprise, manual resource management alike that in C, and the compiler won't help much. Of course this is all subjective but for me the ergonomics of Rust is far too bad. It's a good step in right direction along with ATS, but I really hope we could do better than this. [1] [VIDEO]

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breadwinner · 2024-02 · Reference

His comment is being taken out of context. He is talking about Haskell before they figured out how to add effects. As he says [1], a program without effects is useless, as it doesn't do anything except make the computer hot. Then they figured out how to combine — in a single language — effectful computations, and effect-free ones, without making them pollute each other. The type-system keeps them apart. This makes Haskell useful. So in summary, he is not saying modern-day Haskell (which has effects) is useless. [1] [VIDEO]

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