To be fair, I think Haskell will continue to fill the niche it filled ~10 years ago, around the time it started to get mainstream hype. Small teams of skilled devs delivering robust products that would normally require much larger teams to maintain will continue to prevail. Purely functional lazy programming was never bound for world domination in an economy which is antagnostic to curiosity, creativity and truths.
On the other hand, I have the feeling that we're going to see more and more Haskellers-turned-Rustaceans come to realize that #Rust does little to alleviate the primary barrier to Haskell's wider success -- fast and predictable turnaround time for projects developing cutting-edge technologies -- and will wind up going the same route as some major Haskell projects such as #Unison and #Idris have in recent years, which is to try #Chez Scheme, only to discover that it allows them to release blazing fast functional programs on a generic foundation where major breaking changes are practically non-existent, providing incredible flexibility while significantly reducing dependencies by dint of the ad-hoc tooling that falls out of the bottom of #scheme. Not to mention the joys that come from near-instant startup times, some of the fastest compile time you've ever encountered, fully-customizable interactive development and a surgical #debugger that rivals Haskell in scheer fun. Yesterdays naysayers will become tomorrow's enthusiastic bootstrappers. Or a at least a boy can dream.
That said, in all seriousness I don't think Scheme will ever reach the heights of Haskell's moderate commercial success. But I do think that projects built on Scheme, like Unison, will get a leg up and eventually surpass it, and interest in #lisp will only grow.
@rml I have been learning clojure in my spare time along with common lisp and haskell. So far I am liking clojure the best because of its use of the jvm. I am thinking of learning Kotlin too for android development but worry that an over focus on jvm languages will be a detriment, idk. I have fallen in love with the way functional languages operate and am now struggling to think in an object oriented mindset for uni.
If you like clojure, I highly recommend trying scheme and #guix, which is like NixOS but written in Scheme top to bottom. Scheme takes more time and patience to learn than clojure, but the sheer flexibility that it offers is well worth it.
@rml interesting to see that there's a weird corner of software engineering where people believe programming languages are perpetually at war with one another
@yaxu in a way I understand them, because language popularity ultimately determines how we will have to spend our time amidst our 9 to 5 grind, and also that unlike most other fields, many hackers are involved in the development of the tools they use, so there is some vested interests as well.
@rml I'm not really in that world, lucky to be able to move between languages and enjoy their different perspectives. But, I don't think it's healthy thinking really, pigeon-holing yourself and then fighting an imaginary war against other kinds of pigeons.
I guess as a researcher, I just see huge value in the idea of a 'research language'. Programming language development has been really stuck for decades so I'm all for learning research languages and trying out a new way of thinking.
It would be nice if we found ways in which the economy could support curiosity and creativity..
@rml More broadly programming language culture is limiting because it is exclusionary, and poorly equipped to challenge its basic assumptions about what a programming language is and what its for.
I think war-like rhetoric is more of a symptom of that, than a cause.
@yaxu the accusation of "missed the point of the rust foundation" sounds strange given the recent massive backlash the rust foundation got for its intrusive brand monopoly policy plan. @rml
@rml I remember doing a performance with @nebogeo, I was using Haskell, he was using Scheme. A CS person in the audience came up afterwards and said he enjoyed it, but could barely understand how we were in the same room, let alone sharing a stage. I think he was only half joking. That's one aspect of it.
@rml But I think it's more about an ingrained assumption that programming is something that you do in the service of someone else, within a hierarchically structured organisation that fights against other organisations. The military origins of software engineering are pretty plain to see.
The harm is that tools are only seen in terms of supported implementation and debugging, and not creativity of use.
@antares I was anti-parenthesis when I only used it for elisp and didn't take lisp seriously.
since I read SICP and got into scheme I've become a total convert, and now think programming without parenthesis is just a major disadvantage. they improve and simplify every aspect of programming, and in scheme lead to the prettiest code I've ever seen. for example, see screenshot; parentheses are the shit.
I mean, did they really think Haskell could possibly, eventually dominate? I'm not convinced that even if it's development catered to production first and formost these problems would go away.
@rml I can assure you that it will not come to dominate. PLs wax and vane for all sorts of reasons, but no PL has ever dominated anything by the shear force of its technical features. Part of the problem is that measuring PL effect on programmer productivity is in practice impossible so people continue to choose PLs based on their own tastes and perceived value in the market place and bosses in companies do the same.
@mapcar for sure, and bosses are likely to go with whatever has been marketed to them most aggressively, rather than what serves their programmers best.
overall, I think the most productive programming languages will usually be team-dependent, based on whatever a group of programmers enjoy using the most. but that assumes a co-operative model of software production, which is rare and often difficult to jump start. and participation in capitalist competition usually requires periodic layoffs in favor of cheaper, imported labor-power, which specialized technology problematizes. so bosses tend to go with whatever makes the buying and selling of labor-power easiest, I believe.
@rml I tend to agree though one may observe that bosses not always get to make the choice. For instance, COBOL is for sure is on a downward trajectory but that is not because the bosses wanted it to be like that. Sometimes, the workforce will abandon things to a degree that forces corporations to reevaluate their position.
Though I must admit, I am exhausted trying to get people in my company and elsewhere to see the benefit of Haskell. I had hope for a time maybe 5-10 years ago, that the world of computer education would latch on to it as an education language. But alas, they went with Python because it's "easy." Easy to get started (not easy to maintain). But if you start people with Python, that is the only language they will ever want to use for their whole life and they will quiver in fear and react violently like a cornered animal if you ever tell them they have to use anything other than Python. And now the whole AI industry is using Python and JavaScript exclusively.
I am back to using Haskell as "for personal use projects" only. But lately I have become interested in using Scheme for personal use, so much of my unfinished Haskell code has gone untouched for a few months now. I just have so little motivation to continue working on those projects when no one seems to care about it outside of that subset of software engineers who have really understand how it is better than #Python or #JavaScript in every possible way.
I'll probably get around to releasing some of my old #Haskell projects at some point, but right now I am just having too much fun with #Scheme, and I am just so god damned tired of this AI bullshit.
Fuck Python. Fuck JavaScript, fuck the whole god damned software industry who all insist these are the only languages anyone should be using.
@ramin_hal9001@rml [2/2] … BUT you COULD get people into thinking in functional terms, because so much (must) use it but don‘t know what it‘s actually capable of. Just look into the wonderful book „Grokking Simplicity“ by Eric Normand or watch the astonishing introduction to Lambda Calculus by Gabriel Lebec: https://youtu.be/3VQ382QG-y4
@datenschauer@ramin_hal9001 Javascript was vaguely inspired by Scheme, it's as much "a scheme" as Haskell is a Lisp, which is to say, hardly at all beyond a few similarities (stack machine, eval... not too much else tbh). Javascript is honestly kind of the opposite of Scheme which has in it's standard "Programming languages should be designed not not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary"
Javascript is in the features game, piling them one atop of the other
@rml@ramin_hal9001 Oh sorry I didn’t mean to give the impression that I was saying JavaScript IS a Scheme. And I don’t want to defend JavaScript in any way. I just meant it‘s too harsh to say „fuck JavaScript“. 😅
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