Client: Is your code functional?

Dev: Well, it's not. It's imperative. Object oriented and a bit procedural.

Client: Well, make it functional

Dev: [learning haskell]

A super creepy webcrawler I built with a friend in Haskell. It uses social media, various reverse image searches from images and strategically picked video/gif frames, image EXIF data, user names, location data, etc to cross reference everything there is to know about someone. It builds weighted graphs in a database over time, trying to verify information through multiple pathways — although most searches are completed in seconds.

I originally built it for two reasons: Manager walks into the office for a meeting, and during the meeting I could ask him how his ski holiday with his wife and kids was, or casually mention how much I would like to learn his favorite hobby.

The other reason was porn of course.

I put further development in the freezer because it's already too creepy. I'd run it on some porn gif, and after a long search it had built a graph pointing to a residence in rural Russia with pictures of a local volleyball club.

To imagine that intelligence agencies probably have much better gathering tools is so insane to think about.

People with programming languages named after them:

Haskell Curry
Ada Lovelace
Agner Erlang
Blaise Pascal
Taylor Swift

We had a Commodore64. My dad used to be an electrical engineer and had programs on it for calculations, but sometimes I was allowed to play games on it.

When my mother passed away (late 80s, I was 7), I closed up completely. I didn't speak, locked myself into my room, skipped school to read in the library. My dad was a lovely caring man, but he was suffering from a mental disease, so he couldn't really handle the situation either.

A few weeks after the funeral, on my birthday, the C64 was set up in my bedroom, with the "programmers reference guide" on my desk. I stayed up late every night to read it and try the examples, thought about those programs while in school. I memorized the addresses of the sound and sprite buffers, learnt how programs were managed in memory and stored on the casette.

I worked on my own games, got lost in the stories I was writing, mostly scifi/fantasy RPGs. I bought 2764 eproms and soldered custom cartridges so I could store my finished work safely.

When I was 12 my dad disappeared, was found, and hospitalized with lost memory. I slipped through the cracks of child protection, felt responsible to take care of the house and pay the bills. After a year I got picked up and placed in foster care in a strict Christian family who disallowed the use of computers.

I ran away when I was 13, rented a student apartment using my orphanage checks (about €800/m), got a bunch of new and recycled computers on which I installed Debian, and learnt many new programming languages (C/C++, Haskell, JS, PHP, etc). My apartment mates joked about the 12 CRT monitors in my room, but I loved playing around with experimental networking setups. I tried to keep a low profile and attended high school, often faking my dad's signatures.

After a little over a year I was picked up by child protection again. My dad was living on his own again, partly recovered, and in front of a judge he agreed to be provisory legal guardian, despite his condition. I was ruled to be legally an adult at the age of 15, and got to keep living in the student flat (nation-wide foster parent shortage played a role).

OK, so this sounds like a sobstory. It isn't. I fondly remember my mom, my dad is doing pretty well, enjoying his old age together with an nice woman in some communal landhouse place.

I had a bit of a downturn from age 18-22 or so, lots of drugs and partying. Maybe I just needed to do that. I never finished any school (not even high school), but managed to build a relatively good career. My mom was a biochemist and left me a lot of books, and I started out as lab analyst for a pharma company, later went into phytogenetics, then aerospace (QA/NDT), and later back to pure programming again.

Computers helped me through a tough childhood.

They awakened a passion for creative writing, for math, for science as a whole. I'm a bit messed up, a bit of a survivalist, but currently quite happy and content with my life.

I try to keep reminding people around me, especially those who have just become parents, that you might feel like your kids need a perfect childhood, worrying about social development, dragging them to soccer matches and expensive schools...

But the most important part is to just love them, even if (or especially when) life is harsh and imperfect. Show them you love them with small gestures, and give their dreams the chance to flourish using any of the little resources you have available.

I'm a self-taught 19-year-old programmer. Coding since 10, dropped out of high-school and got fist job at 15.

In the the early days I was extremely passionate, learning SICP, Algorithms, doing Haskell, C/C++, Rust, Assembly, writing toy compilers/interpreters, tweaking Gentoo/Arch. Even got a lambda tattoo on my arm after learning lambda-calculus and church numerals.

My first job - a company which raised $100,000 on kickstarter. The CEO was a dumb millionaire hippie, who was bored with his money, so he wanted to run a company even though he had no idea what he was doing. He used to talk about how he build our product, even tho he had 0 technical knowledge whatsoever. He was on news a few times which was pretty cringeworthy. The company had only 1 programmer (other than me) who was pretty decent.

We shipped the project, but soon we burned through kickstart money and the sales dried off. Instead of trying to aquire customers (or abandoning the project), boss kept looking for investors, which kept us afloat for an extra year.

Eventually the money dried up, and instead of closing gates, boss decreased our paychecks without our knowledge. He also converted us from full-time employees to "contractors" (also without our knowledge) so he wouldn't have to pay taxes for us. My paycheck decreased by 40% by I still stayed.

One day, I was trying to burn a USB drive, and I did "dd of=/dev/sda" instead of sdb, therefore wiping out our development server. They asked me to stay at company, but I turned in my resignation letter the next day (my highest ever post on reddit was in /r/TIFU).

Next, I found a job at a "finance" company. $50k/year as a 18-year-old. CEO was a good-looking smooth-talker who made few million bucks talking old people into giving him their retirement money.

He claimed he changed his ways, and was now trying to help average folks save money. So far I've been here 8 month and I do not see that happening. He forces me to do sketchy shit, that clearly doesn't have clients best interests in mind.

I am the only developer, and I quickly became a back-end and front-end ninja. 

I switched the company infrastructure from shitty drag+drop website builder, WordPress and shitty Excel macros into a beautiful custom-written python back-end.

Little did I know, this company doesn't need a real programmer. I don't have clear requirements, I get unrealistic deadlines, and boss is too busy to even communicate what he wants from me.

Eventually I sold my soul. I switched parts of it to WordPress, because I was not given enough time to write custom code properly.

For latest project, I switched from using custom React/Material/Sass to using drag+drop TypeForms for surveys.

I used to be an extremist FLOSS Richard Stallman fanboy, but eventually I traded my morals, dreams and ideals for a paycheck. Hey, $50k is not bad, so maybe I shouldn't be complaining? :(

I got addicted to pot for 2 years. Recently I've gotten arrested, and it is honestly one of the best things that ever happened to me. Before I got arrested, I did some freelancing for a mugshot website. In un-related news, my mugshot dissapeared.

I have been sober for 2 month now, and my brain is finally coming back. 

I know average developer hits a wall at around $80k, and then you have to either move into management or have your own business.

After getting sober, I realized that money isn't going to make me happy, and I don't want to manage people. I'm an old-school neck-beard hacker. My true passion is mathematics and physics. I don't want to glue bullshit libraries together. 

I want to write real code, trace kernel bugs, optimize compilers. Albeit, I was boring in the wrong generation.

I've started studying real analysis, brushing up differential equations, and now trying to tackle machine learning and Neural Networks, and understanding the juicy math behind gradient descent.

I don't know what my plan is for the future, but I'll figure it out as long as I have my brain. Maybe I will continue making shitty forms and collect paycheck, while studying mathematics. Maybe I will figure out something else.

But I can't just let my brain rot while chasing money and impressing dumb bosses. If I wait until I get rich to do things I love, my brain will be too far gone at that point. I can't just sell myself out. I'm coming back to my roots.

I still feel like after experiencing industry and pot, I'm a shittier developer than I was at age 15. But my passion is slowly coming back.

Any suggestions from wise ol' neckbeards on how to proceed?

The project where I realized I wanted to go from chemist to pro dev.

I built a flow-chemistry spectrometer with monitoring backend in Haskell.

Spectroscopy is where you add a reagent to a glass tube, it changes color, and by measuring the exact color it tells you how much of something (for example, a toxin) is present in the sample.

I had to do that a lot on factory samples, writing down measurements using pen & paper.

I'm lazy so I decided to do the logical thing: Automate it. I bought a second hand spectrometer, stripped the casing, did a shitload of glassblowing and hooked up tubes to the production pipelines, so I could get samples, mixing them in the correct ratio with reagents in continuous flows using valves.

I ended up using 2 home-crafted arduino-like boards (etching PCBs is fun!).

One to calibrate the mixture against known samples and control solenoid valves to continuously cycle through various reagents and deionized flushing water, the other to record the measurements and send them to a server running a Haskell/Yesod API.

The server collected the information into InfluxDB (A time series database), displaying all data on a graphite dashboard.

Eventually I wrote Haskell plugins for most of the chemistry processes, from pH & temperature measurements to polymer property and pigment tests (they made a lot of printer ink).

Then I was fired because they didn't need chemists anymore, and the code "could be maintained by the intern" (poor guy)...

But I did find out that I loved functional programming, chemistry automation projects, and crafting my own electronics during that time.

Not a specifically dev related story, but absolutely rant worthy.

Today I was working from home, and my wife called me to tell me that some awful person had thrown a young cat into the dumpster at her work.

To that person - you are a scumbag. You’re lucky no one left you alone in a hot car as a kid, let alone a dumpster. Seriously, why? Why is it so hard to take it to a shelter?

Anyway - I went and bought a whole bunch of cat stuff - I grew up with cats but I’ve never had one on my own. We’re at the vet now. I think we’ll name her Curry (after Haskell Curry, and lovely spicy dishes).

Every day.

I am a PHP developer.

Yeah, "another PHP is awful" rant... no, not really.

It's just unsuitable for some ambitious projects, just like Ruby and Python are.

First of all, DO NOT EVER use Laravel for large enterprise applications. The same goes for RoR, Django, and other ActiveRecord MVCs.

They are all neat frameworks for writing a todo app, as a better-than-wordpress flexible blogging solution, even as a custom webshop.

Beyond 50k daily users, Active Record becomes hell due to it's lazy fat querying habits. At more than a million users... *depressed sigh*.

PHP is also completely unsuitable for projects beyond 5M lines of code in my opinion. At more than 25M lines... *another depressed sigh*.

You can let your devs read Clean Code and books about architecture patterns, you can teach them about SOLID & DRY, you can write thousands of tests... it doesn't matter.

PHP is scaffolding, it's made of bamboo and rope. It's not brick or concrete. You can build quickly, but it only scales up to a certain point before it breaks in multiple places.

Eventually you run into patterns where even 100% test coverage still doesn't guarantee shit, because the real-life edge cases are just too complex and numerous.

When you're working on a multi-party invoicing system with adapters for various tax codes, or an availability/planning system working across timezones, or systems which implement geographical routefinding coupled to traffic, event & weather prediction...

PHP, Python, Ruby, etc are just missing types.

Every day I run into bugs which could have been prevented if you could use ADTs in a generic way in PHP. PHP7 has pretty good typehints, and they prevent a lot of messy behavior, but they aren't composable. There is no way to tell PHP "this method accepts a Collection of Users", or "this methods returns maybe either an Apple or a Pear, and I want to force the caller to handle both Apple/Pear and null".

Well, you could do that, but it requires a lot of custom classes and trickery, and you have to rewrite the same logic if you want to typehint a "Collection of Departments" instead of "Collection of Users" -- i.e., it's not composable.

Probably the biggest issue is that languages with a (mostly) structural type system (Haskell, Rust, even C#/JVM languages to some degree, etc) are much slower to develop in for the "startup" era of a project, so you grab a weak, quick prototyping language to get started.

Then, when you reach a more grown up phase, you wish you had a better type system at your disposal...

Assembly: He’s the nerd. He speaks very quickly and uses short sentences. Very few people talk to him. He’s considered to be an autist asperger by a majority of the class because he finishes the exams so quickly it’s insane and he faces a lot of difficulties in speaking with others. He’s at school but already dressed like an engineer.

Ada: She’s a foureyes nerd. When she gets the answer she’s doesn’t make any mistake. Ada often corrects the teacher when she writes a line a little ambiguous. She’s building a rocketship in her backyard and she’s always speaking about this weird hobby.

Python: He’s Mr Popular. He likes skate, brags about all the parties he’s invited to. He’s good in all the subjects taught in class but he’ll do them a bit slower than the others. Everyone loves him because he explainsthings so well, sometimes the teacher herself asks Python to explain some part of the course. He’s dressed with a hoodie, a baggy and glasses on the top of the head ;)

Java: She is one of the toppers of the class and very popular. She’s very good in all the topics. The teacher loves her but she’s a very talkative person.

Scala/Kotlin: They are twin sisters and the best friends of Java. Unfortunately, they are not as popular and it’s often Java who takes the lead in the group. It’s very difficult to distinguish one from another. Both are far less talkative than Java but Scala speaks a bit differently than Kotlin and Java.

C: He’s the topper of the class. He’s so fast in completing the exams that the teacher really thinks he’s copying Assembly’s work. He has a little brother C++ and they share a lot in common together. He’s the chess major and often plays chess with Assembly and his big brother.

Go: He’s the new kid on the bloc. He doesn’t like C++ and his friends and he wants to prove he can do better than them. Of course, he prefers playing Go over Chess.

APL: He’s a lonely guy. No one understands him when he speaks. Even the teacher is surprised when APL shows a correct answer after several lines of incomprehensible pictograms. People think that he was born in a foreign country… or a foreign planet ?

HTML/CSS: These twin brothers are very different. One is dressed in black and white and the other is dressed with everything except black and white. HTML is very talkative and annoying and the CSS is very artistic. CSS is the best student in Art lessons and HTML performs well in written expression.

LaTeX: She’s friend of HTML. The teacher likes her because she has a gift of writing. LaTeX likes the mathematical courses because she can draw fancy greek letters. The teacher knows this well and she is often asked to write a formula on the black board.

VBA: He’s in the back, looking through the windows. Not really interested in the courses taught in class. In the exams, he answers always with a table.

C#: He’s in the back playing yet another game on his smartphone. He likes being next to the windows also.

JavaScript: People often mix up Java and JavaScript because they have a similar name. But they are definitly not the same. Javascript spends a lot of time with HTMLand CSS. He’s as artistic as CSS but he prefers things that move. He likes actions and movies. CSS dreams to be a painter wheras JavaScript wants to be a film-maker.

Haskell: He’s a goth. Dressed up in dark. Doesn’t talk to anyone. He doesn’t understand why others write pages when he can write a couple of lines to answer the same question.

Julia: She’s the newest student here. She doesn’t have any friends yet but her secret aim is to be as popular as Python and as fast as C.

Credit: Thomas jalabert

Languages without a fully implemented type system.

Granted, it has been a fad for a quarter century, but everything points at one simple fact: Types matter in programming.

In dynamic languages, you tend to see that testing suites explode into thousands of tests, many of which wouldn't even be necessary if you had some type safety.

You see that languages like JS are forked into more typesafe dialects, like Typescript. Python got typehints since 3.6, and PHP added typehints for methods, then typehints for properties, and will soon even have compound types.

Maybe most languages will never reach the level of Haskell or Scala, and that's totally fine, but I think the direction languages are moving in is pretty much set in stone: No ambiguity, more safety. Code should fail before deploying, not after.

So, today I was at my college library, working on an Haskell project that I have for my Functional Programming class. Library's packed and no seats are available, when the lady that works there passes behind me and says:
"There's people that want to study, if you're gonna be playing on your laptop please leave."
What? Excuse me? Are we in the 21st century or what?
How does a lady that works at a library, on an Engineering College, for more than 10 years, doesn't...
Screw it, I just laughed so hard and proceeded working.

Oh and by the way, first time posting on here!

At introduction of new class teacher asked which _one_ of the following isn't a programming language:
- Swift
- Pseudocode
- Haskell
- HTML

Took my chance on HTML, but apperantly pseudocode is less of a programming language according to him.

Am 23, I plan to have 4 kids in the future.

This will be their first names
1. Ruby - Female name
2. Pearl - Female name
3. Haskell - Male name
4. Python - Last born. Most loved. But am sure he will hate me for his name😂😂

All I need is a wife now or a girlfriend could do🤔...

Only one sticker.

I go door-to-door every Sunday, "Excuse me dear sir/madam, do you have a moment to talk about our lord and savior Haskell?".

Most people slam the door shut in my face, but every lost family I convert to the way of the monad is worth it.

Even if they don't believe in the same deity, even if they express their love for the divine through something as misguided as Typescript or Swift or whatever, as long as they embrace the truth of strong types and composable code, as long as they at least read the gospel of the functional style once in their lives, have one enlightened moment where they see the glory of morphisms, it's all good.

A is for Assembly, a wizard's spell

B is for Bootstrap, so bland and the same. And also for Brainf*ck, will blow you away

C is for COBOL, your grandad knows that

D is for daemon, your server knows what

E is for Express.js, you node what is coming

F is for FORTRAN, which is perferct for sciencing

G is for GNU which is GNU not UNIX

H is for Haskell using functional units

I is for Intance, An action of Object

J is for Java plays with them Always

K is for Kotlin, Android's new toy

L is for Lisp, scheming a ploy

M is for Matlab, who knows how it works

N is for Node a bloatware of code

O is for Objective Pascal, you did not expect that

P is for programming, we all love to do that

Q is for Queries, A database is made

R is for R, statistics are great

S is for Selenium, you have to test that

S is for Smalltalk, let's make it all brief

T is for Turing Test, how human is this?

U is for Unix, build with all talents

V is for Visual Studio, built with all laments

W is for Web, lets build something cool

X is for XHTML, remember all that?

Y is for Y2K, I'm tired as f*ck

Z is for Zip, let's zip is all now.

Get yourself coffee and back to the grind.

Well fuck me. Just went to my first meetUp with a group of Haskell programmers.

I think they broke Enigma in 3 lines of code.

Serious shit.

Hats off to those guys!

Two years ago I moved to Dublin with my wife (we met on tour while we were both working in music) as visa laws in the UK didn’t allow me to support the visa of a Russian national on a freelance artists salary.

After we came to Dublin I was playing a lot to pay rent (major rental crisis here), I play(ed) Double Bass which is a physically intensive instrument and through overworking caused a long term injury to my forearm which prevents me playing.

Luckily my wife was able to start working in Community Operations for the big tech companies here (not an amazing job and I want her to be able to stop).

Anyway, I was a bit stuck with what step to take next as my entire career had been driven by the passion to master an art that I was very committed to. It gave me joy and meaning.

I was working as hard as I could with a clear vision but no clear path available to get there, then by chance the opportunity came to study a Higher Diploma qualification in Data Science/Analysis (I have some experience handling music licensing for tech startups and an MA with components in music analysis, which I spun into a narrative). Seemed like a ‘smart’ thing to do to do pick up a ‘respectable’ qualification, if I can’t play any more.

The programme had a strong programming element and I really enjoyed that part. The heavy statistics/algebra element was difficult but as my Python programming improved, I was able to write and utilise codebase to streamline the work, and I started to pull ahead of the class. I put in more and more time to programming and studied personally far beyond the requirements of the programme (scored some of the highest academic grades I’ve ever achieved). I picked up a confident level of Bash, SQL, Cypher (Neo4j), proficiency with libraries like pandas, scikit-learn as well as R things like ggplot. I’m almost at the end of the course now and I’m currently lecturing evening classes at the university as a paid professional, teaching Graph Database theory and implementation of Neo4j using Python. I’m co-writing a thesis on Machine Learning in The Creative Process (with faculty members) to be published by the institute. My confidence in programming grew and grew and with that platform to lift me, I pulled away from the class further and further.

I felt lost for a while, but I’ve found my new passion. I feel the drive to master the craft, the desire to create, to refine and to explore.

I’m going to write a Thesis with a strong focus on programmatic implementation and then try and take a programming related position and build from there. I’m excited to become a professional in this field. It might take time and not be easy, but I’ve already mastered one craft in life to the highest levels of expertise (and tutored it for almost 10 years). I’m 30 now and no expert (yet), but am well beyond beginner. I know how to learn and self study effectively.

The future is exciting and I’ve discovered my new art! (I’m also performing live these days with ‘TidalCycles’! (Haskell pattern syntax for music performance).

Hey all! I’m new on devRant!

I used Haskell today!

Not having finished any education, and writing code during interviews.

I have a pretty nice resume with good references, and I think I'm a reasonably good & experienced dev.

But I'm absolutely unable to write code on paper, and really wonder how some devs can just write out algorithms using a pen and reason about it, without trying/failing/playing/fixing in an IDE.

Education I think.

I can transform the theory on a complex Wikipedia page about math/algorithm into code, I can translate a Haskell library into idiomatic python... but what I haven't done is write out sorting functions or fibonacci generators a million times during Java class.

I don't see the point either... but I still feel utterly worthless during an interview if they ask "So you haven't even finished highschool? Can you at least solve this prime number problem using a marker on this whiteboard? Could you explain in words which sorting algorithm is faster and why?"

"Uh... let me fetch a laptop with an IDE, stackoverflow and Wikipedia?"

Books and command lines.

I don't like teachers.

I think it's because my learning process is very async and chaotic. When I see a snippet in Golang, I relate it to PHP, Rust and Haskell. I jump to resolving the problem in other languages, trying to find out which approaches work in Go.

Then I read about some computer science concept on Wikipedia and get lost in that while my hunger for knowledge and food increases. After a while I look up a recipe for a pasta salad, and while cutting bell peppers, I see the recipe in terms of typed morphisms, I sprinkle and intersperse ingredients through mapping functions, then decide to write an interpreter for the esoteric "Chef" language in Go so I can interpret my salad recipe while eating it.

Voila, I'm learning Go.

I have no patience for linear mentoring, and others have no patience for mentoring me.

But that's OK.

So much for purely functional programming language.

Made a program to list primes until stopped. I got to about 2 billion when it took 8 GB of RAM and I more or less had to stopped it.

Only took 10% of CPU though.

Had to do an assignment in Haskell and had some bugs all over the way. After some Wodka I did a one liner that worked but I never found out why. 10/10 would do again

1h into learning Haskell and I haven't written a single hello world example yet

Change feels good

I already love it

Ooh this is good.

At my first job, i was hired as a c++ developer. The task seemed easy enough, it was a research and the previous developer died, leaving behind a lot of documentation and some legacy fortran code. Now you might not know, but fortran can be really easily converted to c, and then refactored to c++.

Fine, time to read the docs. The research was on pollen levels, cant really tell more. Mostly advanced maths. I dug through 500+ pages of algebra just to realize, theres no way this would ever work. Okay dont panic, im a data analyst, i can handle this.

Lets take a look at the fortran code, maybe that makes more sense. Turns out it had nothing to do with the task. It looped through some external data i couldnt find anywhere and thats it. Yay.

So i exported everything we had to a csv file, wrote a java program to apply linefit with linear regression and filter out the bad records. After that i spent 2 days in a hot server room, hoping that the old intel xeon wouldnt break down from sending java outputs directly to haskell, but it held on its own.

I work for a "Visionary" in our org. Motherfucker will use something for five minutes and decided it's the new-hot, and off we go chasing it.

"I did a Python + AWS tutorial last night, I get it. We need to start migrating everything to Lambda today."

A week later he hits his first error message that needs more than five minutes of work to solve and we're moving to a local Haskell stack.

I'm working on a programming language with a "bytecode" interpreter and a compiler that translates source code to said bytecode and... it sort of actually works!

I want to recreate an Erlang-style environment, currently you can write functions, call C++ functions via wrappers, have immutable-only values, and it has no explicit control structure apart from statement sequencing and the if-expression because I want to make it as functional as possible. Next thing on the list is to add a green threads implementation and ability to spawn and send messages to processes.

Still a WIP and heck even design-in-progress.

Now for the rant:
I'm using CMake for building C++ (interpreter) and Stack for Haskell (compiler) and I've been trying to get them to talk to each other for hours because I want CMake to manage the Stack build too and shove all the executables into one place. CMake documentation is weird and Stack isn't too helpful either, so I guess I'll just spend another few hours trying to get Stack to fuckin reveal its build directory to CMake and/or build to a given directory. Ugh.

Developing a Haskell project, indenting everything with 3 spaces. Develop to over a million lines of code. Use Darcs as a repository. Run the code on AIX powerpc architecture. Suffering from special snowflake syndrome.

I really like programming in Haskell.
Everyone I know seems to hate it (or prefer to work with oo-languages)
Any friendly Haskeller here who wants to collab/teach/learn from each other? ._.'

My tech stack progression:

Started with PHP without any frameworks, using a homegrown MVC architecture. Used to use `mysql_` functions everywhere. And only jquery + vanilla CSS in the front end.

Then moved to use PDO functions in PHP and Backbone.js + Less CSS in the front-end.

Then moved to Django in the back-end. Did not like Django very much as it is too opinionated and not flexible (although it's damn good for rapid development if you buy into their type of things).

Then moved to Flask + SQLAlchemy and using a home grown architecture. This is a sweet spot for me in terms of back end and stayed in this spot for the longest time.

Moved to Postgres from MySQL as I fell in love with Postgres.

Then learnt React+Redux. Liked it. Made most sense to front-end development this way. Moved front-end stack to React+Redux.

Learning Haskell and been working with Scotty and eyeing Servant for a while now.

Let's see where it goes from here.

PS: this is my personal journey through various tech stacks in various products at various companies I have worked. I'm not talking about moving a product through these many tech stacks. That doesn't make any sense.

One of the biggest barriers to the wide(r) scale adoption of functional programming languages like Haskell, F#, and Scala is how snooty and condescending your average FP developer is. And beginner-unfriendly.

Ask them a question about an intermediate topic (in my case, the Free monad) you're likely to get a whole torrent of category theoretic rubbish in return.

This is a common pattern I see when "experts" answer questions.

Now, it didn't bother me much because I've studied a fair amount of category theory and can usually follow such answers, but, for the sake of the general case, I'd like to shove these rules into the heads of everyone writing an answer to a question (not just FP):

1. If you can't illustrate a concept clearly without going into verbal diarrhoea with phrases like "monad homomorphism" and "just a monoid in the category of endofunctors" then you clearly haven't understood it properly (unless, of course, the answer absolutely requires it). An answer is not the place to show off your knowledge of a topic.

2. Please remember that everyone was a beginner at some point. Including you. Understand that some concepts can be extremely frustrating at first and yet incredibly simple after you grok them (eg. monads).

3. If the person asking the question is a beginner, using complex concepts in an answer just because it's a more "elegant" way to explain it doesn't really help them. They are more likely to get confused and drop the topic.

(Kudos to those people who give highly relevant, insightful, simple, and intuitive answers, you guys are the best).

Normal programmers cheer up when their code runs,
Haskell programmers cheer up when their code compiles.

Bonus points if you also wrote it in a language entirely new to you, or even in entirely different paradigm. (In my case Haskell.)

Dynamically typed languages are barbaric to me.

It's pretty much universally understood that programmers program with types in mind (if you have a method that takes a name, it's a string. You don't want a name that's an integer).

Even it you don't like the verbosity of type annotations, that's fine. It adds maybe seconds of time to type, which is neglible in my opinion, but it's a discussion to be had.

If that's the case, use Crystal. It's statically typed, and no type annotations are required (it looks nearly identical to Ruby).

So many errors are fixed by static typing and compilers. I know a person who migrated most of the Python std library to Haskell and found typing errors in it. *In their standard library*. If the developers of Python can't be trusted to avoid simple typing errors with all their unit tests, how can anyone?

Plus, even if unit testing universally guarded against typing errors, why would you prefer that? It takes far less time to add a type annotation (and even less time to write nothing in Crystal), and you get the benefit of knowing types at compile time.

I've had some super weird type experiences in Ruby. You can mock out the return of the type check to be what you want. I've been unit testing in Ruby before, tried mocking a method on a type, didn't work as I expected. Checked the type, it lines up.

Turns out, nested away in some obscure place was a factory that was generating types and masking them as different types because we figured "since it responds to all the same methods, it's practically the same type right?", but not in the unit test. Took 45 minutes on my time when it could've taken ~0 seconds in a statically typed language.

Visited Java and couldn't C on short distances. Went to an iClinic that Swift'ly gave me c++ goggles. I can now C# but I Haskell been struggling with my OCaml as it's been bit by a Bash'ing Python in a Shell. I'm not trying to sell you a Ruby but I can't find my way back to BASIC.

Haskell...

Haskell the king!

Learning Haskell, I'm loving it!

I am starting to like haskell... :D

OMG ever since I started to love Haskell, all nonfunctional languages look ugly, I am getting worse at writing procedural code!

Writing code in a hipster language like Haskell

I thought that learning C would give me a good baseline for learning whatever other programming language.

Then I started looking into Haskell.

Learning C was easier than learning Haskell, and learning C was atrocious.
What in the actual fuck is this?

This one isn't so much a rant but a short story about how small the world is.

Basically, I am a college student and I've fallen into the "Thinkpad Hipster" Group, more specifically the guy who runs Linux ( Arch, in this case ) learns some mostly irrelevant language, in this case Haskell, which while useful isn't really relevant in the modern world.

So this is where the story begins, I am sitting on the train to college and I am reading through a book on Haskell on my X240, so all is fine, when I notice some guy sitting in front of me who looks like an older version of me, I then notice that he's also using a Thinkpad, now I'm curious as to which, because I love the laptops, I see he has an X240 Aswell, oh, sweet, eventually he gets up to go to the toilet and looks over my shoulder at my laptop screen and sees that I'm learning haskell, when he comes back he begins to try and help me, which I was surprised at because so few people would know the language, when he showed me his laptop he was running almost the same setup as me, it was similar to a "Glitch in the Matrix" Moment, I truly didn't expect anyone to be running near the exact same stuff as me, look so similar and also be in the same area as me, that made my day knowing that some people also do the same stuff as me.

Frustrated, tired and a bit lost.

I'm a "Senior PHP Backend Dev", which includes not the greatest tech stack nor the best job title, but it pays fine, and the company is awesome to work for.

I suck at writing features, but I'm great at bitching, and I easily put complex abstract concepts into usable models. So I'm also QA, tester, tech lead, database architect, whatever.

That makes writing PHP less annoying, because I create the rules, and whip devs around when they forget a return type definition or forget to handle an edge case. But I don't write a lot of code anymore, I mostly read (bad) code.

Lately I REALLY feel like doing something else... problem is that I know JS/ES6, but really dislike React/Vue and the whole crappy modern frontend toolchainchootrain of babelifyingwebpackingyarnballs. I know Python/Tensorflow/etc, but don't feel like I want to go into data science or AI. And then I'm awesome at the shit no one uses, like Haskell, Go and Rust (and worse).

I got a job offer which combines a very interesting PHP codebase with a Java infrastructure, where I could learn a lot... and I'm kind of tempted.

Problem is, everyone always shits on Java. I always made a bit of fun of Java myself. Don't even know exactly why, probably some really cruel instinct which causes kids to bully the least popular kid.

I know the basics, I've written the hello world, and a small backend app for a personal project. I know how strict and verbose it can be. I love the strictness in Haskell and Rust.... but those are both also quite terse.

Should I become a Java dev? I'm not talking about Android SDK, but an insane enterprise codebase at a life sciences corporation.

To the pro Java devs: What are the best and worst things about your job, about the weekly processes, about the toolchains? Have you ever considered other languages? Do you unconditionally love and believe in Java, or do you believe Swift, Kotlin, Scala or whatever will eventually make it completely obsolete?

Will Java hasten my decline into the cynical neckbeard I was always destined to be?

There are a lot more fun langauges, but looking at realistic demand and career value...

Mother fucking SQL, fuck mathematicians, fuck every thing!

So let's supose we'd only need the first char of a string. Every, and I mean fucking every (php, java, javascript, ruby, python, haskell) fucking language, uses something like `substring(input, 0, 1)` as it knows the input is nothing more than a fucking array of chars, otherwise known as motherfucking String. Logically the offset for the first char is 0.

Enter SQL, there you need to put `SUBSTRING(input, 1, 1)` because fuck every one! Fucking math guys who developed relational algebra on which (most) databases are based on (I love you for it, but come on you fuckers!), Decided that the first character should be at position 1...

Fuckers

Just started learning haskell and if someone wants a 'why' I give you quicksort:

quicksort [] = []
quicksort (p:xs) = (quicksort lesser) ++ [p] ++ (quicksort greater)
where
lesser = filter (< p) xs
greater = filter (>= p) xs

Folks...

I think I need to get away from web development...

Honestly, no grudge held against web/mobile development itsef... But the projects, the teams, the workflows... It's always shitty af.

I'm fed up with the bad architecture, poor management decisions, unmaintained legacy code, broken windows, arrogant juniors, arrogant seniors, code smells left to rot, the freaking red door... Hell! The fucking "we don't have time for that" answer to testing... Damn!

Been there done that.

Feels like it's always the same crap and unfortunately, it's rare to start a professional project from scratch.

Fucking angular, broken piece of shit.
Fucking react (& RN) community modules, broken pieces of shit.
Fucking lazy-ass node developers.
Fucking ES and fucking garbage proposals submitted to the TC39.

I wish I could do Haskell / Rust / Clojure professionally... I could even enjoy Go with a good team... Anything but that huge pile of dogshit JS and its community of brainfucked so-called developers.

I'm currently taking another dive into haskell. I didn't know you needed a masters degree in theoretical something to print text on stdout.

Note to myself: make dog-emoji-based language huskyell

This is changing my mind!

I was reading the post made by another ranter in which he was basically asked to lower the complexity of an automation script he wrote in place of something everyone else could understand. Another dev commented that more than likely it had to do with the company being worried that ranter_1 would leave and there would be no one capable of maintaining the code.

I understood this completely from both perspectives. It makes me worry how real this sometimes is. We don't get to implement X tech stack because people are worried that no one would be able to maintain Y project in the event of someone leaving. But fuck man, sometimes one wants to expand more and do things differently.

At work I came to find out that the main reason why the entirety of our stack is built in PHP is because the first dev hired into the web tech department(which is only about 12 years old in my institution) only knew PHP. The other part that deals with Java is due to some extensions to some third party applications that we have, Java knowledge (more specifically Spring and Grails) is used for those, the rest is mostly PHP. And while I LOVE PHP and don't really have anything against the language I really wonder what would it be of the institution had we've had a developer with a more....esoteric taste. Clojure, Elixir, Haskell, F# and many others. These are languages and tech stacks that bring such a forward way of thinking into the way we build things.

On the other hand, I understand if the talent pool for each of these stacks is somewhat hard to come up with, but if we don't push for certain items then they will never grow.

The other week I got scolded by the lead dev from the web tech department for using Clojure to create the demo of an application. He said that the project will most likely fall into his hands and he does not know the stack. I calmly mentioned that I would gladly take care of it if given the opportunity as well as to explain to him how the code works and provide training to everyone for it :D I also (in all of my greatness) built the same program for him in PHP. Now, I outrank him :P so the scold bounced out of the window, plus he is a friend, but the fact remains that we reached the situation in which the performance as well as the benefits of one stack were shadowed by the fact that it holds a more esoteric place in the development community.

In the end I am happy to provide the PHP codebase to him. The head of the department + my boss were already impressed with the fact that I was able to build the product in a small amount of time using a potent tech stack, they know where my abilities are and what I can do. That to me was all that matters, even if the project gets shelved, the fact that I was able to use it at work for something means a lot to me.

That and I got permission to use it for the things that will happen with my new department + the collective interest of everyone in paying me to give support even if I ever leave the institution.

Win.

Great, just my luck.

There are two types of programming languages, one that everybody hates and one that nobody uses.

Finally understood this after learning Haskell.

My cat was not amused that I am writing Haskell today!

So, this is probably somewhat esoteric but...

While studying at university I had a "programming paradigms" module, dunno why they called it that, it was more like "introduction to functional programming".

So, it's kinda mind bending, we'd only really started to get our heads around classical object oriented programming and they throw functional programming at us.

It's worse than that though, for do they use an established language, like lisp/scheme, functional Python, or even given Haskell?

No, of course they didn't. They taught us Oz.

You probably won't have heard of it, but this language is burned into the back of my brain, along with a vague understanding of the n-queens problem we had to solve graphically (using qTk, which I dunno if someone took qt and tk and blended them, I stopped asking questions after a while).

To top it off did this language (at the time) have a stand alone interpreter? Did it buggery! It was coupled to the Mozart programming system, which is just Emacs (which has a bloody lisp built into it,so close, yet so far 😭).

It gets worse, though, oh does it get worse, for pause dear reader and consider, have you ever heard of Mozart/oz before, I'd put money on most of you had not heard of it until today.

For, you see, I believe at the time of writing, one, yes, ONE text book exists on this language. When I was doing my assignment there was merely some published conference notes and language design documents.

That's not all, I was not the only one experiencing difficulties with this language, someone in the class ended up pouring through the mailing lists and found the very tutor teaching the class struggling at first to understand the language.

I had to repeat that year. The functional programming class was one semester.

When I retook that year, it was a whole year long. However, halfway through the year, original tutor was fired and a new tutor was hired to teach the language.

He was, understandably, just as confused as we were.

There was a Starbucks and a pub equidistant from the lecture hall, though in opposite directions. From lecture to lecture we had no idea which one we'd end up in.

I have reason to believe Mozart/Oz it some sort of otherworldly abomination designed to give students the occasional nightmare flashback, long after they've left.

My room had post it notes, sheets of paper, print outs, diagrams, doodles and pens, just stuck to the wall, I looked like a raving lunatic three hours away from being institutionalised. There was string connecting one diagram to the next and images of a chess queen all over. As I attempted to solve the n-queens problem.

Madmans knowledge, I call it. I can never unlearn all that, in fact it seeps into much of the code I write. Such information was not meant for the minds of a simple country bumpkin such as myself...

Mozart/Oz... I wouldn't be the programmer I am today without it, and that's frankly terrifying...

Everywhere you go, you find these memes where developers are skeptical of their work. Things like "It works. I don't know how. It doesn't work. I don't know how.". Don't you guys think this is a huge problem? And people say that their programming language is the best, because preference. But isn't this happening because our tools suck?

Yes the problems maybe inherently complex but at least we should be able to figure out the logic behind the snipper and reason about it.

Haven't really experienced it, but they say Haskell and the likes are great at this and it must be true because it's backed by mathematical properties and laws, not " experience".

So the rant here is, wish we had better tools in the mainstream that allowed us to enjoy absolute faith in at least what we have written, regardless of the fact that we understood the problem in the domain.

In a getting started tutorial about Haskell:

"You probably already have haskell installed because you tried to learn it once and failed"

He's so right...

Compound infinite list comprehensions in Haskell make my head hurt.

-> Contribute to Zulip's mobile app on github.

-> Contribute to babel.

-> Build 5 npm packages.

-> Dive into Haskell.

-> Have 100,000 ++s on devRant😁

-> Make a private project I built on github public.(still thinking about it).

fuck me. I started the night with the question "what are classes, in JavaScript?", did a lot of reading, and just came to the conclusion "religious colonialism.", and I didn't even read a single Crockford essay.

I'm just going to give up, go learn Haskell, get a lambda tattooed on my ass, and be done with it.

Main language, do people have such a thing? Some quixotic shit about various languages I use:

C#: Microsoft
F#: never quite committing to 100% functional paradigms while still being one of the most enjoyable langs I use
Java: null handling via optional and maybes are ugly, but better than it was
C++: surprisingly functional in 2020
Haskell: no one else seems to ❤️ it, despite it being fucking beautiful
Kotlin: Ternary warfare, Czech sports opinions on how languages should work
Clojure: parenthetical scoping makes me far happier than it should
Typescript: makes ever more sense as it changes

Starting to learn haskell, I think I'm gonna hang myself

I found this on a wiki with Haskell Humor... it's interesting...

How to Shoot Your Self in the Foot With Haskell: Putting the unsafe in unsafePerformIO!

You shoot the gun, but the bullet gets trapped in the IO monad.
Couldn't match expected type 'Deer' against inferred type 'Foot'.
While compiling your program the compiler produces a type error long enough to overflow a kernel buffer, overwrite the trigger control register and shoot you in the foot.
After trying to decipher the type errors from the compiler, your head explodes.
After you've finally found a way to circumvent the type system and shoot yourself in the foot, Oleg appears out of nothing and shoots you in the foot for coming up with it before him.
You shoot the gun but nothing happens (Haskell is pure, after all).
Your foot is fine, until you try to walk on it, at which point it becomes mangled.
You have a shootFoot function which you've proven correct. QuickCheck validates it for arbitrary you-like values. It will be evaluated only when you end up at the hospital. You hope this doesn't come to pass, as it actually returns a bullet-ridden copy of yourself and you don't want to be garbage-collected.
foreign import ccall "shootparts.h shootfoot" shoot_foot :: Gun -> Programmer -> IO ()
shootSelfInFoot = unsafePerformIO . shoot . foot $ self -- Shoot self in foot 0 or more times depending on evaluation order
No instance for (Target Foot)
arising from use of `shoot' at SelfInflictedInjury.hs:1:0
Possible fix: add an instance declaration for (Target Foot)
In the expression: shoot foot
You go to shoot yourself in the foot but the bullet is in the ST monad and the gun is in the IO monad, so you can't.
You ask Haskell to shoot you in the foot but by the rules of lazy evaluation you don't need the result yet so it doesn't happen.
You decide to shoot yourself in the foot but get distracted devising a ballistics algebra and wondering if you can do the calculations in the type system.
You want to shoot yourself in the foot but realize there is no Gun datatype so use Arrows instead.
You shoot in the direction of your foot, but since you are inside the STM monad you can just retry until you figure out what to do.
You shoot yourself in the foot, but you are perfectly fine as long you just don't evaluate the foot.
You shoot yourself in the foot, but nothing happens unless you start walking.
Don't forget about memory consumption! If you don't look, the bullet causes heap overflow. If you look, the bullet causes stack overflow.
You *appear* to have deliberately shot yourself in the foot, and yet your program actually runs perfectly OK due to lazy evaluation. (So long as you remember to not look at your foot...)
You aim the gun at your foot, pull the trigger and remove the clip. When you look at your undamaged foot, the hammer clicks on an empty barrel.

Apparently, floating point math is broken.

=SUM((2.1 - 2.0) - 0.1)

In PHP and Haskell this also happens

So... I cannot find me an internship which uses low level languages ( like c, c++ ) or something like elixir, rust, haskell... the only internships available are in mobile and web development...

Don’t know what to do anymore... it’s annoying, and so so frustrating... and I NEED an internship if I wanna get a college degree...

The new Windows Terminal (Preview) lets you watch a PewDiePie video while working on Haskell!

Primarily IntelliJ IDEs.

I'm using IDEA for Rust & Kotlin, PHPStorm, Datagrip (DB), and sometimes PyCharm CE.

IDEs can feel a bit dirty with how heavy they are, and the lack of customization/control. But at the end of the day there's just nothing that can measure up against IntelliJ's inspections, integrations and project indexing.

My ideal product would be one universal IntelliJ IDE, but combined with the openness of VSCode/Atom, having everything transparently configurable through stylesheets and scripts.

As an editor though.... I use Vim for LaTeX, Markdown, plain text and Haskell code... but not so much for other programming languages.

Vim was my first editor when I moved from C64 to PC development 25 years ago, and while you get used to balancing keybind vimgolfing with being actually productive, i've always found maintaining plugins and profiles too cumbersome -- the reality is that Vim is an awesome TEXT editor, but it's really awful as a CODE editor out of the box.

When you want to try out a new programming language, you don't want to have to mess around with your Vimrc and Vundle and YCM for half a day just so you can comfortably write "Hello World" in Rust or Elixir... you just want to click one install button, press F10 to compile and see if it flies.

Oh, and I use Xed a lot for quickly editing files... because it's the default GUI editor on Mint desktops, and it's quite good at being a basic notepad.

I prefer functional style programming because it is easier to me to think in modules and functional hierarchies than it is object style shierarchies.

All in all, languages like F# and Clojure have always been fascinating to me. I wish I could find a use case for Haskell, but I can't. If anything F# is awesome to me because I already know .NET and really dig the entire framework, the strides made by Core are outstanding.

I had tried Scala before and just couldn't get into it. Far easier to just stick to Java even if I hate the idea of extending classes all over the place.

Ocaml is interesting too, but I know little to nothing about it, and Elixir looks far too much like Ruby for my taste even if I do like Ruby.

Choice is good, but sometimes overwhelming

Still learning haskell not even knowing a single good usecase for it. Nevertheless it is fun.

My journey with IT learnings, Some of Major learning changes. The following are the years in which I start learning given technology or domain.

1993 Birth
1999 #HTML
2001 #PHP + Foxpro
2001 #Haskell language
2002 BASIC
2002 #8088 Assembly
2003 #Linux
2007 Visual #Foxpro
2009 #C Language
2010 #Python
2011 #JAVA for mobile #development
2015 Virtual Machines
2016 Networking
2018 #Blockchain
2019 #Elixir & Phoenix
2019 #DevOps

I learned Haskell in a day 😀

Haskell Clojure Rust Erlang

Lang-fan matrix

My favourite function already.

Why does every Software Engineering role at the top companies never have PHP or any functional languages in it’s list of languages they want you to be experienced in?

It’s always Java, Python, C#, C/C++, Objective C or Ruby. What about Elixir, Scala, Haskell or Clojure?

So I just started going to university and have a subject called "programming", we are taught Java, Haskell and Prolog. Every week there is a sheet with homeworks, programming tasks. Often we get something like a boilerplate, so we implement some methods and stuff like that. Those tasks are prepared and created by scientific assistants. They upload the boilerplate and sheets. Take a look at the programming style they follow in Java. Actually I can't find a pattern they follow, except from the spacing between the lines. We are 1000 students in the informatics course, of which probably 10% know how to properly program 😅
So like 900 people see and adapt/learn this real bad coding convention. It really pisses me off, that they basically don't give a shit about convention or teaching them. I have to say that the logic some times is as worse as the conventions 😓
Besides I am not cocky with conventions, but I think at a high-class university they should teach proper convention.

Haskell, Scala or Erlang?

For every feature added, two are requested.
- Spencer White

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE ADD A HASKELL DUCK

So after someone mentioned Haskell in a post, I googled it and started some kind of tutorial.
It's fun!

imbrace the immutabilty

Any Haskell programmers here?
I started to learn this language for fun two days ago and so far I find it absolutely amazing and really different to OOP languages. Most of the time the solutions make so much sense, but actually coding them requires really abstract thinking of the problem. How fast did you learn Haskell? How long it took you do code it comfortably? Any advises you can give me? I work mainly through a uni exercise sheet from a friend from a different uni, and the rest is hoogle and google :P

I work with J2EE every day, especially Spring and Spring Boot.
I like it very much but when I am home I love tinkering with C++ (even tough I am a beginner in this language).
Is anyone else like this? It's like C++ has a misterious charm for me, not sure why. I also enjoy haskell and erlang, but keep at getting back at C++.

This might not resonate with many ranters here... but FUCK Taylor Otwell & Graham Campbell.

Like, not on a personal level. Maybe they're great to drink a beer with. But as framework devs... fuck everything about them.

Laravel seems so nice, it takes away many annoyances of developing in PHP. Collections are the array object you've always needed. The route bindings, middlewares, request validation objects, it's all sweet.

But eventually your company serves a few million customers, you run into specific performance problems or missing features on a deeper level. You open the issue tracker... and see a few hundred issues about the problems you are encountering, they already exist.

Some just have a short paragraph with a request for a feature, some complete PRs with tests in the style of the framework. All of them closed.

Reasons?

"We don't think anyone will ever need this"
"This seems complicated, you can just do <super non-DRY hacky code>"

FUCK YOU WITH YOUR TODO APP SNIPPETS AND USER-POST-ARTICLE EXAMPLES. I'M NOT BUILDING THE NEXT WORDPRESS. I'M DEALING WITH THE REALITY OF GRAPH DATABASE CLUSTERS, COMPLEX AUDITING LOGS AND A GAZILLION QUERIES PER SECOND.

Sigh... the problem with all these "simple" and "elegant" languages & frameworks is that they don't fucking scale.

Not because the language, server or framework intrinsically can't do it, but because the maintainers are stuck thinking in terms of their retarded non-realistic example apps.

I think I'll go back to my cave and write some Haskell or Rust to calm down.

Fuck, haskell is hard!!

!rant

so the other day i was programming and suddenly i wanted to learn haskell. (i don't know why it hit me so suddenly, maybe because it's a 'pure' functional programming language and these 2 terms i knew nothing about)

and to be honest it's really hard coming from an imperative programming language (C/C++, yes, i know they are different in their ways). it's like learning to program again! you really have to get a different mindset and for me honestly it's hard to grasp the idea that 'variables' are immutable! like, that's soooo weird it still stucks to me. for example how did they define the max or min function without using a while loop? what are monads?

I am just 2 days in but it'll be a fun ride!

I see more and more people encouraging people to learn Haskell. But why ? What can you do with it, that you would not do with another language? what have you done with haskell?

Pure functional stack. NixOS, Purescript, Haskell

Why is it that virtually all new languages in the last 25 years or so have a C-like syntax?

- Java wanted to sort-of knock off C++.
- C# wanted to be Java but on Microsoft's proprietary stack instead of SUN's (now Oracle's).
- Several other languages such as Vala, Scala, Swift, etc. do only careful evolution, seemingly so as to not alienate the devs used to previous C-like languages.
- Not to speak of everyone's favourite enemy, JavaScript…
- Then there is ReasonML which is basically an alternate, more C-like, syntax for OCaml, and is then compiled to JavaScript.

Now we're slowly arriving at the meat of this rant: back when I started university, the first semester programming lecture used Scheme, and provided a fine introduction to (functional) programming. Scheme, like other variants of Lisp, is a fine language, very flexible, code is data, data is code, but you get somewhat lost in a sea of parentheses, probably worse than the C-like languages' salad of curly braces. But it was a refreshing change from the likes of C, C++, and Java in terms of approach.

But the real enlightenment came when I read through Okasaki's paper on purely functional data structures. The author uses Standard ML in the paper, and after the initial shock (because it's different than most everything else I had seen), and getting used to the notation, I loved the crisp clarity it brings with almost no ceremony at all!

After looking around a bit, I found that nobody seems to use SML anymore, but there are viable alternatives, depending on your taste:

- Pragmatic programmers can use OCaml, which has immutability by default, and tries to guide the programmer to a functional programming mindset, but can accommodate imperative constructs easily when necessary.
- F# was born as OCaml on .NET but has now evolved into its own great thing with many upsides and very few downsides; I recommend every C# developer should give it a try.
- Somewhat more extreme is Haskell, with its ideology of pure functions and lazy evaluation that makes introducing side effects, I/O, and other imperative constructs rather a pain in the arse, and not quite my piece of cake, but learning it can still help you be a better programmer in whatever language you use on a day-to-day basis.

Anyway, the point is that after working with several of these languages developed out of the original Meta Language, it baffles me how anyone can be happy being a curly-braces-language developer without craving something more succinct and to-the-point. Especially when it comes to JavaScript: all the above mentioned ML-like languages can be compiled to JavaScript, so developing directly in JavaScript should hardly be a necessity.

Obviously these curly-braces languages will still be needed for a long time coming, legacy systems and all—just look at COBOL—, but my point stands.

rant :: [Char] -> DeveloperHappiness

Don’t really have anything to say. Just currently learning me a Haskell and attempting to replace WSL’s Ubuntu with Arch Linux. Carry on.

One language that I have always wanted to give more attentio to but felt as if I was in a constant fight was Haskell.

To me it felt unintuitive, and required a MAJOR shift in practice to get going. I really wanted to give it a chance but could not.

Every other language felt natural(even Lisp) but haskell for some reason seemed like a major mindfuck)

For context, I've been working for a couple years now with Rust, and, I have to say, the experience has been astoundingly pleasant. The language is both incredibly productive and meets each of my use cases and stipulations regarding speed, safety, and complexity. That said, I've come to beg the question, "what is the point of functional languages like Haskell?" To me, what seems attractive about Haskell is the inherent thread safety, and the added syntactic niceties of code written in the language. However, one must keep in mind, my experience with Haskell has been pretty limited, simply due to the massive learning curve that the language presents. Such a "learning curve" brings me to my central point: these days with languages like Rust which bring together the best from functional and imperative worlds, it seems like functional languages are becoming increasingly irrelevant. Let's face it: no sane person will choose to learn a functional language as their first language, outside of academia and mathematics, and OOP/OOP-like languages remain dominant in the space. So, why then, is Haskell any different? What benefit do languages like Haskell pose in the modern CS space that thread-safe, non-GC languages don't already provide?

I’m from Komi Republic. In Komi language (it’s entirely different from russian), “Komi airport” is видза корам коми мулöн юркарö, pronounced “vid-zah koraam komi muh-loan yur-kah-roah”.

And you said Haskell was difficult

So guys, do you think I should learn one functional programming language and if so should it be haskell?

devRant.. I need your help.

So for the last year I've been self teaching myself python, go, & haskell. I've really been enjoying myself, to the point we're I would like to make it my career. Insert problem, I stumbled upon ECU(engine control unit) reprogramming & flashing, and instantly fell in love with the idea. However I can not find any information it. Every college I've called talks to me like I just asked them to teach me witchcraft.

Does any dev have experience with ecu programming? How did you get into it?

Thanks!

Hey everyone!

I'm on the hunt for new and exciting languages!

I'll state the ones I already know:
Python, Haskell, C(++), C#, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Rust, Lua, about every kind of Basic, some branches of Lisp, BrainF**k, assembly, Octo (Chip-8) and GML(basically JavaScript).

I've also learnt some styling languages:
Html, CSS, Markup and Markdown.

Some misc languages too: Regex and a runny bit of the Wolfram Language.

Also I'm kind of limited to Windows, Linux and Android, as I do not own any Apple hardware except I have access to an old iPad, so are languages like Swift still good?

Thanks!

Morgan Freeman's voice is like the smooth syntax's from Python meets the functionally of Haskell

If you're working on close to hardware things, make sure you run static analysis, and manually inspect the output of your compiler if you feel something's off - it may be doing something totally different from what you expect, because of optimization and what not. Also, optimizations don't always trigger as expected. Also, sometimes abstractions can cost a fair amount too (C++ std::string c/dtor, for example, dtors in general), more than you'd expect, and in those cases you might want to re-examine your need for them.

Having said all that, also know how to get the compiler to work for you, hand-optimization at the assembly level isn't usually ideal. I've often been surprised by just how well compilers figure out ways to speed up / compactify code, especially when given hints, and it's way better than having a blob of assembly that's totally unmaintainable.

Learnt this from programming MCUs and stuff for hobby/college team/venture, and from messing around with the Haskell compiler and LLVM optimization passes.

!!rant
Types of elitists in the computer science area I REALLY HATE:
* Linux kernel developers: if they hear anything that's not linux you will be prosecuted
* functional programing developers (haskell, scheme, etc): they will bitch slap you if you even dare to mention php or javascript

Late night + Stellardrone + Haskell = bliss

Today I discovered that Haskell can be compiled to js. This is both wonderful and disturbing: having the strengths of Haskell feels right and encouraging, but having to transpile it to js feels unnaturally dirty.

Still, I'm not sure I can apply this at my job in any future, but I might have just the case in the brewing.

That moment when you're very happy you just completed a hard Haskell kata in CodeWars, with 8 lines, three functions, a lot of functional concepts (which would take at least 30 lines in Java or C#) and they show you the top voted solution by another user with JUST TWO LINES and a lot of function composition.

Not sure if I love or hate haskell... It's awesome, but then again the syntax is so fucking confusing...

!advice

So I've been self teaching myself Python, which I've loved learning. However I hit a wall. I'm terrible with large project ideas, which has brought everything to a halt.

Being that I loved learning python, I'm thinking of picking up a second language to fill the void & expand my knowledge. I've dabbled a little bit in Java & Haskell. Go looks pretty interesting.

In your opinion what would be a good complementary language to Python?

So, I'm supposed to do a project in Haskell that is due next week. It's a group project and it's me and 2 colleagues. Unfortunatelly one of them had to drop college because of some personal problems. I feel bad for him.
The thing is, the other one has no clue what Haskell is. I mean, he has no clue how programming is. He doesn't even know what an array is, like, wtf.
Sure, I can do the work all by myself and take the credits for it. But he's a nice guy and has been asking me to teach him Haskell in my spare time. He even told me to tell the teacher I did the project all by myself.
I'm kind in the middle of an existencial crisis. What should I do?
Life sucks, dam.

Setting up a Haskell environment on Windows is fucking AIDS. Guess I'll screw it and just use ANTLR for my compiler.

I was very proud that I know some different programming languages.

Until I see some functional programming, trying haskell, and spend hours in order to understand what's going on...

Last week my first pull request to our company's Haskell project went into production. At the tender age of 52 I am a true beginner at Haskell, having read half a book and tried it out between other tasks for a couple of weeks before that. I would never have went for learning Haskell if I would not have had to but I am glad I did. And it will take a long time before I reach any sort of mastery.
I started out in the late nineties with JavaScript, learned PHP, Java and then Go. My first impression of Haskell is very favourable, the compiler is very informative and very fast, although not as fast as the Go compiler. The language is so different from anything I have used previously that a lot of synapses have had new connections. But the syntax! It's the one thing I really dislike. <$> and other crazy short hand. Like $ instead of parentheses. Haskell people clearly have a peculiar take on readability.

I think I fell in love with Haskell

Developing in Haskell. Lecturer is assuming we all use Windows. Some of us are better than that...but only some.

Functional programming languages...

yall really gonna bitch about javascript and then go write some ugly ass Haskell or Closure ??

*opens up a library file, reads first line*
{-# LANGUAGE TemplateHaskell #-}

Oh boy, this is gonna be intense...
I always dread having to go through Template Haskell code.

Haskell meetup

It's been 5 years this month since I started learning programming, getting interested after learning about Linux, wanting to do operating systems and games.

I started with C++, went on to C and assembly language for about 2 years and gave up on it for the most part.

Afterward did Java for two years and hated every second of it! Switched to Python instead (been using it since 2.7.5).

Now I do Haskell and JavaScript and those languages do everything so much easier I can never see myself ever going back!

It's kinda cute how people think strict typing is going to prevent bugs and make software reliable. It's all the rage now. I am not saying that there is anything wrong with strict typing but after all it was the original state of affairs and dynamically typed languages where developed to fix it.
Same hype with pure functional programming. It's going to push bugs out to the edges and make everything work. The pursuit of purity is no new thing and it breaks down on contact with the real world, such as a complex JSON. A switch to Haskell won't change that much. I have seen people hunt peculiar bugs in Haskell for ages.

Do you guys know a cool language to get a bit more into functional programming?
Doesn't matter if purely functional or a mashup of functional and imperative programming.
And please a real-world language, let Haskell stay in its Ivory-tower where it belongs.

If I could, I'd attempt to create an ideal language. I'd aspire that its features would be:

-The easyiness of Python

-The library ecosystem of Javascript

-The readability and cross- platformness of Java

-Functional features of Haskell

-Modularity of Lisp

-Low level features of C/C++

-Powerful with strings and data, like Perl

-Both compiled and interpreted, with REPL

Anything missing from your favorite languages?

And another weekend full of work, because I don‘t get shit done in the office.

Being kind if the lead dev in my team, everyone is coming to me for nearly everything and I rarely have time to work on my current ‚fulltime‘ project.

It‘s really frustrating. I just want to code .__. FML

(Maybe I should learn other programming languages and switch jobs? I always wanted to learn Haskell)

I don't know if this can be classified as a legit "regret" or not, but anyway (hence no wk78 tag).

I've always chosen to focus more on the theory behind computers and computing rather than on practical dev skills. Not saying that the more theoretical things aren't fun - concepts from theoretical CS and maths still regularly blow my mind, as do the more "esoteric" languages like Haskell, Idris, and Coq. However, after seeing you fine folks here at dR talk about practical development, it feels like there's a whole world of stuff that I've missed about computers and programming, especially web programming. I think I'll tackle that next when I have some free time, maybe spend some time learning PHP to see what all the hate's about... (really though, it must do something right if it has such a huge userbase, plus, I think devRant uses it too...?)

Anyway, just wanted to say that you folks are really cool and an awesome source of inspiration. Best community ever.

Personal favorite quotes from my cubemate...
- JIRA, God of Blunder!!
- trickle-down badge-o-nomics: when I have to ask someone else to lend me their badge because someone else borrowed mine
- Haskell users can kick a motherfunctor right in the monads
- You can't put monads in Go because they try to prefix everything with go-
- Always use live rounds when troubleshooting -- never blanks
- Equifax's Apache wasn't patchy enough
- I saw the last episode of the first season of The Last Kingdom
- You gnow it's good cause it's GNU

!rant

You knoe, my first insights into computer programming came out of spite. I thought windows to be garbage and wanted to blame someone other than myself for my machine constantly crashing. Thus I discovered programming and down the rabbit hole. But my interest in computer science came from videogames. Portal in particular. I found the idea of GlaDOS fascinating and thought that artificial intelligence would be something interesting to research. The web then gave me Lisp, and boy was the language different from all the other languages I went through. I remember feeling super excited when Racket, Common Lisp and eventually Clojure would help me discover many different ideas. Every time I work with reduce or maps or stuff like that in other languages I always thank languages such as Clojure for having me descipher different ways of manipulating data to get a result. To this day I feel sad whenever I find that my languages do not have the same constructs that Clojure has. I mention Clojure because it is my favorite flavor of Lisp. But one thing that always remains grest to me is firing up Emacs and plugin my code to Slime or Cider and see the repl pop up waiting for something to happen. This feeling is beautiful.

Please guys, if you have not tried it, do so! You might hate it at first or push it aside. But trust me, once you get it it will really change the way you think about programming in general. Try the great Clojure for the Brave and true, and go through the third chapter succesfully. If you do not like Lisp by them then no harm done! You would at least know that there are other options.

Now, here are some cool things:
For the standard implementation, try Common Lisp

For a more modern Scheme, try Racket or Guile

For targetting the JVM try Clojure (more akin to Common Lisp) or Kawa (scheme like)

For the python AST get Hy (pun totally intended)

For JS try Clojurescript

For emacs scripting try Emacs Lisp (has way too many disasdvantages but still relatively close to common lisp)

Honorific mention to more pure functional programming languages for Haskell, F#, Ocaml.

Also worth mentioning that Js , Ruby and Python have great functional constructs.

(println "you will not regret it!")

Should I learn Haskell? Would it help me with other coding languages as well?
My main language is JavaScript, also I would like to learn functional programming.

Today I read a comment on devRant about somebody asking what 1337 means. I think most of us know (almost trivial, maybe?), but what is really great is that so many people replied explaining what it means. Some replies were awesome, some were creative, some were just a basic answer to the question.

But none were hateful. ❤️

DevRant is a place for awesome people like you who understand that every one of us doesn't know something every day. That's developer life. That's devRant life too! The other day I told a senior developer about a Haskell project of mine and he asked: 'What is Haskell?' I was impressed, but it taught me a lot.

On devRant I see no troll comments like 'omfg fucking retard, you must be a faggot and live in a dumpster', which are common on the www nowadays and could have been found under a question like 'what is 1337?'. But not here. And this, while I see the occasional swearing in rants, but never at other members.

So thank you for just being normal people among other normal people. We swear at each other's fugly code sometimes, but we are a creative bunch of smart asses that stay classy at it.

👊

Hey, dfox & trogus
How about some Haskell/Scala/F#/OCaml/Clojure/Scheme swag? For example, I'd love a Haskell-caped devDuck.

Show us functional programmers some love pls ;_;

Stop making fun of different programming languages

C is fast
Java is popular
Ruby is cool
Python is beautiful
Haskell is Intriguing
Javascript is ________

Started to learn haskell.
.
.
.
suddenly my whole life seemed to become a 'list' of events 🤐😔

; or no ;, that is the question.

Why isn't Haskell as popular as other languages if it is so safe and so expressive?

I'm studying atm and I survived Haskell, SKI, ... now, in the second semester we started with Python (yeay ♡) and Java (that's fine).

One of the first exercises is about installing Jython ('cause it's good, right? /sarcasm off), using the lecturer's module and write some code for it. It's about painting some shitty graphics *gasp*...

I use PyCharm (not really necessary for these crappy exercises) and programming on Windows and/or Linux.

Downloaded Jython, installed it, set it as interpreter - works fine (win10, pycharm).
Some students got weird errors using linux - for me it's the same but meh Idc.

Today I tried using Jython on my notebook, too (win10, pycharm). Downloaded it from the Jython Project website. Can't update pip, can't run modules - error is about fckin charsets...

Some other student figured out - wrong version of Jython. The newer version has some bug fixes.
2.7.1 is the one and only - the download section of their website offers 2.7.0 as latest release...

So - how to know there is a version 2.7.1?
#1 version control website = Wikipedia

So... there is a blog, guy's writing about this release - this installer is hosted at maven central. Yeay. Obvious. Thanks.

Can't describe such stupidity - maybe it's the user again 😂

Learn F#, Haskell, Rust, WebDevelopment, Assembly, whatever else comes up.

Webpack? More like Fudgepack 😡

OK sure, I know it's cool to rip on Webpack without taking 5 minutes to understand it, but I really have tried. Every time I want to do anything which used to be trivial with grunt, gulp or brunch, it requires a whole bunch of sorcery and every post I see online around the same topic inevitably ends with something like "that's not modular", "WebPack doesn't work like that", "you're holding your phone wrong" etc. And it's not like I'm someone who is afraid of new or uncomfortable things. I try new languages almost as often as there are new JavaScript fads (OK maybe not THAT often). I use "weird" keywords and experiment with different key maps all the time. I swap my daily window manager on an almost quarterly basis (and xmonad is no picnic as an introduction to Haskell). But what the fuck is it with so many people in positions of influence in the frontend world always taking one step forward, two steps back and an occasional hop sideways when it comes to tooling (and dragging everyone else along with them)?

How did such a turd of a tool become defacto for so many frontend frameworks? Do hard core JavaScripters just really really hate outsiders and want to deter others from their precious as much as possible? Fuck Webpack and fuck everyone responsible for helping it permeate so thoroughly through the software development industry.

Haskell is so funny like if you ask a function for some pizza, you get a bunch of pizza boxes back, and then when you want to put topping on the pizza you're like "hey can i like actually have the pizza now?", and then you realise you can't actually change the pizza so you make copies of them with the topping on.

Gonna learn Haskell by implementing a Markov chain based text bot, wish me luck!

Trying to learn Haskell for the Nth time and the only side effects it has is on my life :/

dev && !rant

I am thinking about picking up a functional language. Currently I use Kotlin (and I fucking love that language) but I have to admit that it's support for functional programming is limited.

But I think their lies a certain beauty in fp and I want to do some project with it.

The 2 main problems are:
1. I have no experience in functional programming. I have no clue how to structure my program (potantialy without oop) and write clean testable code.
2. I don't know what language to use. Scala seems great since it has good IDE support and I like the Java ecosystem and Haskell seems to have more beauty but is missing that IDE support and it is very unfamilar for me.

So what do you guys think I should pick up? And how do I learn to write good software with it?

Functional Programming Class, an assignment it's that we should develop a calculator, creating our own basic functions (addition implementation with a half-adder and string manipulation).

Teacher tolds us that it has to be coded in Haskell and for the GUI we can use whatever we want, then this fucktard comes around and speaks like he knows everything

Him: Oh, yeah we will use IntelliJ to link the Haskell code with a GUI, because IntelliJ supports Haskell

Me: But IntelliJ it's a(damn) IDE, you still need to code the GUI.

Him: But IntelliJ supports Haskell, we will use it to build the GUI.

Me: Yet what you're trying to say it's that you will use Java to create the GUI and call from there Haskell, and that you will use IntelloJ forms to create the UI

Him: No, no, we're not using Java, we will use IntelliJ, are you dumb? Don't you know what's IntelliJ for?

*Fucking facepalm*

I don't know but at this point I'm not feeling proud that THIS kind of retards are going to graduate in this year...

Playing with Haskell and almost pulling my hair out. Some thing works, switch place of a call and I get weird errors. Baaaaaah

I'm getting bored of java.

It's more worth learning perl or a functional language (haskell)?

Sooo... I have an Haskell exam tomorrow and I thought I had the evening to review some stuff and try to code a little bit more. Guess I was wrong since I had to take my sister to her soccer practice at 7 pm and am arriving just now home.
Well, I guess if I fail, I'll just blame it on her.
That's what siblings are for, right?

the first time i saw a haskell snippet

gimme that sweet, sweet recursion

Everyones like "python is pseudocode" but honestly i dont see it, after sql, python is the least intuitive syntax i ever worked with, and i frequently use haskell so

I agree with this guy: there should be a Semiring typeclass

I thought nested list comprehensions in haskell were hard.
Until I tried to make a non fixed footer that stays on the bottom.

I feel really stressed about everything I want to learn. Everytime I hear someone talk about some new framework or I see people here discuss languages or stuff I don't know anything about, I want to learn it. Right now the list of things I feel I need to learn is so fucking big that I've no idea where to start. Also, I need to focus on my upcoming exams, so I've absolutely no time to learn or do anything. Backend, front-end, iOS, Android, desktop, OS development, everything. So much to learn, so little time.

Flame war:
Best functional language + eco system for web dev -
F#, Haskell, Scala, elixir, other?
Same for scientific/mathematical simulations?

I was writing in Haskell GHC - and after I got tired of fixing some tuple problem I had no idea about, I typed "fix bugs" and pressed enter....

Ok, so I'm a student and in my free time, I mostly write a bit of python, C++ and a bit Haskell for fun...

I wanted to try out Android development now...

HOLY FUCKETY FUCK, THIS SHIT TAKES TIME!

most of the time, I get an idea, open vscode and start typing (maybe install some modules for like 10 minutes), not with this: Android studio took hours to download with all the needed SDKs and libraries, then I created a new empty(!) Activity, then fucking Gradle needs hours to get it fucking ready... On a fucking XPS 13 9370!

How do you guys cope with that waiting, does it scale that way to bigger projects?
I would call myself rather patient, but if I have an idea, I don't want to set up the most basic environment for 3 hours...

Man that shit is bulky...

!rant

Do you think it is worth learning functional programming and specifically haskell. It seems like a really good concept, but a lot of people claim that it's not applicable in real scenarios.

I prefer starting from theory and then proceed with practicing. For example, to learn haskell and deeply understand it, I started by taking a course in category theory and I already have a degree in computer science and then start writing actual code. The same with JS. I started with theory for JIT compilers and studied how V8 works, how it utilizes event loops and how they are implemented in the kernel. Then I started experimenting with code and demos. It's a success path for me, that has worked every time with every new technology.

Why do you (if you do) prefer dynamic languages? I.E Python, Ruby, JS over Kotlin, Swift, and Haskell? (I know why people don't like Java, I purposefully omitted that).

Don't get me wrong, I love git-annex, but when I skip a week of pacman -Syu, I get a pretty large list of updates, thanks to haskell.

Thankfully this is a VPS, so it has very high bandwidth and doesn't actually take that long :D

Complete To-do projects and make new To-do lists. Have to start Haskell and my own SaaS. 😉

It's getting on my nerve to constantly change from one programming language to another in one semester. We are learning web development (html css js), functional programming (haskell), speech analysis (matlab) and logical programming (prolog). It's driving me kinda mad having to change the approach for each assignment every few days.

Recently I've been getting sucked further and further into functional programming. Started with learning Java 8, and when toying with Streams I was looking into different features (dropWhile and takeWhile) which lead me to Java 9. Now I find myself fluent in Scala and learning Haskell. When does it end 😵

to be honest, i hate every OOP, in my opinion it's just add complexity in every way. yet i would like to use Functional Programming but it's fukking hard to learn and hard to get use to. Tryna get used to Haskell.

FUCK. I'M DONE WITH THIS SHIT. CAN'T GET MY HEAD AROUND THIS.
My intelligence is limited to Java & Python.
NO VARIABLES, RETURN TYPES..NOTHING! JUST FUCKING MAGIC! AND ALSO, FUCK EMACS.

Favorite functional programming language and why. Go!

Love pattern matching, esp. in function clauses. No programming language can be considered feature rich without it. Yes, I'm looking at you, <mainstream programming language>

I hate when people compare programming languages without understanding much, e.g. "Do they have semicolon or not?" "Lol there are lots of parentheses in Lisp". I even hear someone said "Haskell and PHP are alike because they both use the $ sign"

Come on, don't be that shallow, programming languages are much more then syntax and their logos. Learn more about their paradigms, ideologies, the reasons behind those designs.

Functional languages like Haskell, F# and so on have been designed by Satan himself to torture poor dev souls

I hate university projects, they are so dumb sometimes.

Now I am supposed to write a Haskell like functional programming language using C++ templates, and I have 10 days to do it...

I'm looking forward to a day when I could finally wave the middle finger to this institution.

Lisp is such a cool language, and I feel like because functional programming is becoming so popular, Lisp could end up the go-to language because it's so versatile and, though there are many parens, it's friendlier at first glance than Haskell. (And there are so many libraries for it, omg)

Haskell's ++ operator 😫

Started learning Haskell a few weeks ago. Never been more frustrated and excited at the same time.

I want to use Emacs more and more for my development stuff. I feel fairly comfy while developing server side stuff (clojure, haskell, ...) but I can't find a good setup for the client side.

Has anyone here experience with Emacs and React? Is there a good setup where stuff like format document etc. works? Is it event worth using emacs for the frontend or should I just stick to vscode?

asked the Graduate Teaching Assistant about the syntax for Haskell and why it was giving me weird errors. She replies by saying she's never taken this course before and is learning it along with us but she can help in the logic. -__- had to go ask the prof for help.

After some time experimenting with Haskell (with mixed impressions) and quite positive feeling about Scala, I am really shocked by Clojure. I tried simple example from youtube tutorial, but it looks so awful, complex and compared to Haskell and Scala version it is just so verbose. I read that Clojure is a concise language. Is the tutorial bad or is this a fine code in Clojure? I really don't like the code at all...

While I writing PHP I have to think of Haskell all the time, how nice everything would be with Haskell and I dream of the time when I can be with Haskell again. <3

data Word: A Word is an unsigned integral type, with the same size as Int.

And here I was thinking a word is a string! And that's not all, there is also Word8, Word16 and whatever else.