Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by vasquez 1874 days ago
I really like Clojure, it's the language that finally made FP "click" for me. It was my go to for hobby/side projects for quite a while.

Dynamic typing is why I eventually switched. Haskell scratches the same itches that Clojure did, but the compiler and type system are immensely helpful, and keep saving me from tripping over my own feet.

2 comments

Common Lisp is my go-to language, but I also like Haskell and Clojure. To me, Haskell is a Lisp, and supports REPL driven development.
Somewhat off topic: My problem with Haskell is that every time I've tried to read the documentation, I've felt like I needed a PhD in type theory to understand all of the terminology. As a practitioner (not a researcher), I just want to know how to do things, but the documentation has always been a roadblock to me. So, after a number of attempts at learning to use Haskell, I've decided its not for me. Not because of the language itself, but because of the traditions around it.
This. I think I understand the basic concepts, but you get a first big slap with doing your first curl to some other service. Ergonomics of the libs is often times horrible. You are in this constant loop, oh I can't do this I need algebraic derationalizer to align those types. Several hours later your curl request works. You start looking at wall to decompress. Curl is a pretty good example its a complexity that has been made super easy in a lot of languages.

I am very much waiting for some "extremely" constraint subset/flavour of Haskell that gets some adoption(I do not think I am alone in this lobby). No crazy stuff, no "just read the types", no "its just a small extension". But I also know that it is not really feasible without breaking the IO enforcements.