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by zaro 2101 days ago
> I have great experience in imperative programming languages, I usually write programs that are correct as soon as they are compiled, which is what the haskell advantage is supposed to be.

Same here. It's simply not worth switching. And also Haskell is probably not going to provide much more productivity in lots of areas.
1 comments
codygman 2101 days ago
I'd argue if you can manage to write 10,000 line imperative programs that are correct as soon as they are compiled:

1) that's amazing, some of us aren't smart enough to do it without functional programming

2) I bet you could write 2-3x as much functional code and maintain the correctness. Reason being understanding doesn't require keeping track of mutable states in your head.

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axilmar 2101 days ago
No one writes 10000 line programs, either imperative, or functional, without testing and running smaller parts of it. At least no one that I know of.

I have dealt with ML while doing my MSc in software engineering, and wrote my dissertation on it.

I didn't see any improvement regarding bugs and state.

What I have discovered in functional languages is that while in fp you are not required to keep track of mutable states, you are required to keep track of values passed in parameters.

In my humble opinion, those two things are equal in difficulty and consequences.

I had almost the same number of bugs in my ML application that I would have in the imperative program, but they manifested in different ways.

I don't think FP requires the programmer to keep less things in their head, provided that the imperative program follows some good principles, that is.

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codygman 2101 days ago
> In my humble opinion, those two things are equal in difficulty and consequences.

I'm not so sure, I'll give this idea some thought though.

> I had almost the same number of bugs in my ML application that I would have in the imperative program, but they manifested in different ways.

Can you talk about some of the different ways the same bug manifested?

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axilmar 2100 days ago
I didn't say 'the same bug manifested in different ways', I said 'same number of bugs but manifested in different ways'.

I.e. the defect ratio was similar, bugs in my FP program were of different type than in the imperative ones.

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