Simon Peyton Jones - Haskell is useless
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN cites it constantly in language debates for his useful-versus-safe diagram and the convergence of languages, with commenters clarifying that his remark predates how Haskell handles effects.
What it is
A short clip of Simon Peyton Jones talking about the future of programming languages, saying Haskell is useless in the sense that pure programs cannot have effects, while mainstream languages are useful but unsafe. He describes languages converging, with ideas such as STM and LINQ moving between them.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2012 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends ernst_klim · 2023-10 · on “Was Rust Worth It?”
These are two issues, which a theoretically orthogonal but in practice not so much. These are known as soundness and completeness. A good talk on topic [1] Rust will reject a lot of sound programs, and that's a huge performance hit. You are hitting the incompleteness wall with multiple mutable borrowing, closures in structures are a huge source of pain as well. And usually the answer from the community is "use handlers instead of pointers", but this gives you, surprise surprise, manual resource management alike that in C, and the compiler won't help much. Of course this is all subjective but for me the ergonomics of Rust is far too bad. It's a good step in right direction along with ATS, but
Recommends ReleaseCandidat · 2024-06 · on “Gerald Sussman: Programming is (should be) fun (2022) [video]”
That must of course be "Haskell is useless" [this video] But apart from that, his enthusiasm can even make the mseemingly most boring topic interesting. I'd personally start either at "the story of Haskell" Escape from the Ivory Tower [LINK] Or something more recent, about Epic's Verse [LINK]
Cites tikhonj · 2012-02 · on “.NET: So long and thanks for all the fish”
I was particularly thinking about things like order and group in list comprehensions[1]. Turns out the paper introducing them was actually from 2007, so maybe it's not that recent :). (I thought it was newer than that.) [1]: [LINK] Here is a random video I found earlier where SPJ talks both about this in particular and the exchange of ideas between Haskell and .NET in general: [this video]
Cites Raphael_Amiard · 2012-10 · on “Rob Pike: Go at Google”
I think Simon Peyton Jones says it best about Haskell : [this video] He says Haskell is useless. Without even debating that (it can certainly be useful for certain classes of programming problems), you can see his point : The goal of Haskell was to start from an ideal view (pure functional programming without side effects) and try and see how to make that eventually practical for everyday programming, without sacrificing the pure core of the language . You have languages, like F# (or even C# !) that takes lessons from Haskell, with at the same time being practical for pretty much every programming task (their platform , .Net, makes them useless for a lot of use cases, but that is another problem)
Cites lukaseder · 2013-11 · on “What's wrong with Object-Oriented Programming and Functional Programming”
Sign. Yet another discussion full of trolling pros and cons of FP vs. OO Guys, listen to Simon Peyton Jones himself: "Haskell is useless". He's discussing stuff with Erik Meijer in this video: [this video]
Cites ZenoArrow · 2014-09 · on “ML Family Workshop”
"A good example is the notorious video interview [this video] in which Simon Peyton Jones laments the fact that pure functional programming languages just make the CPU heat up and nothing else (i.e. they have no useful side effects.)" You're not the first person I've seen that's misunderstood this video, I can only guess at why... One thing it's probably worth remembering is that Haskell has been a research platform for many years, and some of the Haskell features that people take for granted today did not exist in earlier versions. SPJ is not saying that Haskell is useless now, but it was close to useless for creating programs for a number of years. As a case in point, try to imagine Haskell wit
Cites tempodox · 2015-03 · on “Kronos Haskell”
Simon Peyton Jones himself does not count Haskell among the “useful” languages (Simon Peyton Jones - Haskell is useless): [this video]
Cites Arnor · 2015-05 · on “Announcing Rust 1.0”
Awesome! I assume you intentionally released this on a Friday just to eat up everyone's weekends :) Thanks for the hard work. As I dig in, I'm hoping that Rust will fit in the "useful and safe" sweet spot in Simon Peyton Jones's diagram here: [this video]