> But it does take a lot of learning and unlearning to become a fluent functional programmer.
Just no.
The reason Haskell is so complicated to become fluent in has nothing to do with the inherent complexity of functional programming. The Haskell community is just in love with complexe abstraction for the sake of abstraction, extremely terse and hard to understand syntax (see for example the obsession with introducing convoluted operators) and generally favour hard to understand style like point free where pipes are a lot easier to follow. The Haskell community is full of people who are here to geek out rather than produce software. Haskell is what happen when you let one upmanship leads your language design.
Meanwhile, you can learn SML, F# and Ocaml in a couple days, gradually enjoy the functionality they have to offer and benefit for a nice community. I really don't understand why anyone would choose Haskell.
> generally favour hard to understand style like point free where pipes are a lot easier to follow
No they don't. Every Haskeller I know (myself included) acknowledges that sometimes point free style is better, and sometimes it isn't. None of them would unilaterally declare it better, and most generally avoid it except in very simple situations.
> The Haskell community is full of people who are here to geek out rather than produce software.
The Haskell community is full of people who are here to geek out about the best ways to produce software. This means they embrace tools like mathematics, and are generally extra thoughtful about structuring programs in principled ways. It's a wonderful community of people who care about the details of their craft and treat it like a skill to be honed over time. I have a lot of respect for that.
If I could rant for a moment: I'm really sick of spending many years of my life investing in myself and my ability to produce software with the best tools humanity has to offer, only to have these people in Hacker News tell me I'm just doing mental masturbation when it seems like they don't even understand what they're criticizing.
Function application pipelines and function composition are closely related. Here's a "pipe" in Haskell:
\x -> h $ g $ f x
At a certain point you realise that in many cases seeing the `x` is not just useless but needless visual noise. The following is identical and more readable once you've internalised composition:
h . g . f
And this extends to a cute trick in which, if you need to explicitly provide that data to begin with, you can do this:
h . g . f $ x
I'm now working with Haskell having previously come from PHP and JS/TS. Composition is more readable, it's just harder to get started with because it's different to what you're used to.
As for the "geek out" comment, of course, I enjoy programming for the intellectual sake of it. I'm not product-driven. Don't make the mistake of thinking everyone's the same as you, nor that of thinking there aren't benefits to being so intellectually-motivated. I don't know if it's intentional but your comment comes across as rather self-righteous.
If you don't understand why anyone would choose something that many people have chosen, you might want to be a little less bold in announcing what motivation those people must all have.
Yeah, um... let's be sure to apply that on all sides.
I can't count the number of times I have read, here on HN, that people only choose imperative programming or OOP because they're ignorant or stupid. Because if they actually understood FP then of course they would choose it, so the only reason they don't is because they haven't learned or can't learn.
Jesus Christ, I am so sick of you and all the people like you who repeat this lie. I've invested a lot of time learning about category theory, domain theory, type theory, etc. so I could become the best version of myself as a programmer, and I have seen very real benefit from this investment. Only to have you and these other people in HN tell me I'm just trying to "feel smart". Your arrogance is so off-putting to me.
When did HN become so anti-intellectual? If you don't understand something, then either learn it or don't—but you don't need to bash other people for their own efforts.
> Only to have you and these other people in HN tell me I'm just trying to "feel smart". Your arrogance is so off-putting to me.
When did HN become so anti-intellectual? If you don't understand something, then either learn it or don't—but you don't need to bash other people for their own efforts.
Listen, I have both an advanced degree in mathematics where I mostly did algebra and I have work for large software projects with hard constraints in the aerospace industry. I have nothing about people learning category theory. It's an interesting intellectual endeavour but people who think they are learning domain theory and category theory in order to be better engineers are just dicking around. It's not anti-intellectualism. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of what and where the problem actually is. Actually this last sentence sums up my issue with Haskell pretty well now that I think about it.
Just no.
The reason Haskell is so complicated to become fluent in has nothing to do with the inherent complexity of functional programming. The Haskell community is just in love with complexe abstraction for the sake of abstraction, extremely terse and hard to understand syntax (see for example the obsession with introducing convoluted operators) and generally favour hard to understand style like point free where pipes are a lot easier to follow. The Haskell community is full of people who are here to geek out rather than produce software. Haskell is what happen when you let one upmanship leads your language design.
Meanwhile, you can learn SML, F# and Ocaml in a couple days, gradually enjoy the functionality they have to offer and benefit for a nice community. I really don't understand why anyone would choose Haskell.