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by colingw 878 days ago
Hi. I actually left Haskell for Rust. And when I say "left", I mean I don't start new projects in it. I still maintain my libraries.

I wrote Haskell for 10 years or so, both FOSS and professionally. I've "been around the block" so to speak and consider myself to have a decent view of the landscape. Overall, Rust lets me code in the style I want while being very resource efficient. I write Rust professionally.
1 comments
Hizonner 878 days ago
The part that confused me was your leaving Haskell for Rust and then leaving Rust for Lisp. Were both of those transitions aimed at some common goal?

I mean, if I left Haskell, I think the main reason would be to to shed the load of thinking simultaneously about laziness and how it interacts with optimization. OK, almost any non-Haskell language gets you out of that. But choosing to leave Haskell specifically for Rust would be about efficiency first and foremost, especially improving on the size and complexity of the RTS (and its limited platform support). I could also see wanting the concurrent programming benefits of Rust's ownership system. And it's nice to be able to write embedded or kernel code. And there's a bandwagon to jump on.

Lisp, on the other hand, doesn't really seem like an improvement over Haskell in any of those ways. It solves different problems. Lisp feels like it's on the "opposite side" of Haskell from Rust. So why did you "reverse" and try Lisp to begin with?

I agree that Rust is ugly, by the way. Honestly I think it started with keeping the C syntax and went from there.

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colingw 877 days ago
I should make it clear that I haven't left Rust; I write it every day professionally.

I transitioned from Haskell to Rust to capture efficiency and small binaries. Since I'm in the game of shipping CLI tools, this was important for me.

You're right though that Lisp is on the other end of that; we're back to bigger runtimes with no tree-shaking, since that would hinder debugging. For now I'm experimenting with the Interactive Programming paradigm because the debugging story is just too good. For long-lived programs, this may be the way to go.

Rust code can be made nice to look at it, but it isn't the default nor the trend.

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