With respect, and I say this having experimented with Haskell, OCaml, any many other functional languages as well, just, no. Those languages come at a MUCH higher mental cost than go. Go is wonderful because writing it doesn't feel like I'm attempting a CompSci doctoral thesis. I can also say I have yet to see the Go runtime crash, and I am using in production.
What do you mean by "mental cost" here? Cost of initial learning? Then I agree... But learning a language is an O(1) cost that takes a few weeks to a few months. We program with the language for many years.
I never said the Go runtime will crash, but your programs will, because of unsafe nullability, mutability in the concurrently shared state, and various other problems in Go.
Better concurrency in Haskell: In addition to having light-weight threads like Go and channels like Go, Haskell also has software transactional memory which Go lacks. Haskell also has `par` annotations on pure expressions that allow parallelization with guaranteed lack of effect on program semantics. Haskell also has data parallelism.
Haskell (and most of the other languages mentioned) is exceptionally clever. This, above all else, is it's downfall. For me, especially when tasked with building a high productivity development team, clever code is a ticking time bomb. It's easy to write, but hard to maintain and modify. It requires more mental ram to analyze any given piece of code, and is much more difficult for multiple programmers to contribute to. It's tiny, to be sure, but, again, I think that is negative, not a positive. Maximum clarity is not minimal code.
Go, on the other hand, is not clever. It's boring as hell, honestly. This is a Very Good Thing® when it comes to building out a dev team, and I feel, the single biggest reason Google put the resources into creating it.
As for the crashing, of course I see some dangerous areas. Educating developers on avoiding a small regions of pitfalls is much easier than managing a team of clever coders though.
I'm not a haskell expert (obviously), but the time it takes me to parse things like this is time I would rather spend reading 5-10x the number of lines and getting the meaning right away.
let loeb x = fmap ($ loeb x) x in
loeb [ (!!5), const 3, liftM2 (+) (!!0) (!!1), (*2) . (!!2), length, const 17]
(btw, I have no idea what the hell this does. Something to do with spreadsheets, apparently. I found it on http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blow_your_mind, which has enough cleverness to make me want to cry)
I've seen cleaner and more readable code in production haskell, but this sort of thing happens enough that I'm very cautious.
I think the first paragraph of the page linked explains why that code is so impenetrable. You will not have to read or write Haskell like that, ever. Good find though! On a similar note, the Haskell community is amazing. You can learn absolutely everything between the Haskell wiki, freenode irc and hackage. How great is it that EVERY lib/package/framework is documented on hackage in exactly the same format? Very great. Coming back to JavaScript is a bummer :(
I don't think you'll ever find this kind of code in production.
With years of Haskell experience, I rarely encounter code that is hard for me to read. This is a good counter-example, and is not typical code.
I read 10 lines of Haskell code roughly as fast as I read 10 lines of Python code -- yet the 10 lines of Haskell code can pack much more useful information.
So Haskell is a great tool for more efficient communication between programmers, who can write shorter messages to each other to convey the same information.
But, then you gotta remember, "worse is better" (New Jersey style), and Go is worse. New Jersey style: (1) be simple in both implementation and interface (2) correct, be correct as long as it doesn't make it more complicated, simple is more important than correct (3) consistent, when you can be consistent, do be, but simplicity is more important and (4) completeness, be as complete as you can, but realize completeness can be sacrificed for any other objective.
I think C and Go share a lot of New Jersey style -- Go is great in simplicity (remember simple isn't easy). I think Go will continue to go quickly because of these attributes.
> I never said the Go runtime will crash, but your programs will, because of unsafe nullability, mutability in the concurrently shared state, and various other problems in Go.
Personally, these problems are not what are a time-sink for me. The problems that I spend a vast majority of my time on tend to fall into two categories.
First, there are design problems. i.e. how do you model your data to be queryable, how do you architect services to make them resilient to machine failure, how do you monitor services, how do you route logs, etc. With these problems, Haskell doesn't help here. Go doesn't help here either.
Second, there are operational problems. i.e. your FS might randomly corrupt some data you stored previously (remember to checksum), your caches might get out of sync (fun problem if you ever go multi-DC), your service has shoddy backoff and DDOS's a failing downstream service, etc. With these problems, Haskell doesn't help here. Go doesn't help here either.
Am I saying that there's no value to the fact that Haskell solves these at compile time? Of course not. Just that the relative amount of time that would save for me is not my deciding factor when picking a programming language.
Another way to think about it is that people have (I include myself in this category) written large-scale projects in dynamic languages which have all the problems you mentioned plus a few more. And yet, the developers at Twitter, or Facebook, or Reddit don't spend the vast majority of their time face-palming at type-errors or NPEs, or ConcurrentModificationExceptions. They have other concerns.
I think people tend to underestimate the amount of time they spend on problems, when those are uninteresting. A single null dereference error may be trivial to fix, but the overhead around fixing any bug may be costly. For example, you might need to deploy a whole new version, rerun test suites and have a bunch of meetings. Then after all of this, you might remember that the problem only costed you 10 minutes of fixing the bug.
When you implement a red-black-tree, do you not spend any time testing your invariants? Or figuring out the bugs? That's a good example of where the Haskell type system can simply give you compile time guarantees saving you from bugs and from having to test them.
I also worry about the problems you mention, many of which Haskell indeed doesn't help much with. I don't see how these problems (which you solve once, usually by reusing a library) are what costs the majority of the time. A big, non-trivial implementation has bugs and will require testing. Haskell will have less bugs, and require less tests. This is a pretty big deal.
It's weird that you bring Twitter as an example, as they canned a dynamic language solution for a static language that is in many ways very similar to Haskell.
I've seen multiple large scale projects in dynamic languages. They all fail to scale well, both performance-wise and maintenance-wise. Statically-typed systems scale far better along both of these axis.
> I think people tend to underestimate the amount of time they spend on problems...
Again, the implication is that people who use languages with looser type-systems than Haskell spend lots of time dealing with the problems that you mention. In my experience, that is not the case. You can claim that I'm underestimating the impact of such bugs if you'd like.
> When you implement a red-black-tree, do you not spend any time testing your invariants?
Testing is, as far as I can tell, the reason that these problems don't come up. In the process of solving all of those problems I listed above, you tend to write a bunch of tests that exercise the same code that is run in production.
> It's weird that you bring Twitter as an example, as they canned a dynamic language solution for a static language that is in many ways very similar to Haskell.
I assure you that this transition is far less complete than you might think, and even when complete, will have more Java than Scala. Note that both of these languages allow shared mutable data, both allow null pointers.
> They all fail to scale well, both performance-wise and maintenance-wise. Statically-typed systems scale far better along both of these axis.
Oh, I agree. Go is statically-typed. However, you're advocating going even further along the spectrum, and I'm saying that going further brings diminishing returns, and starts costing you in terms of available engineers, and your productivity in writing code. I think Go occupies a good point along this spectrum, where I can write robust code without arguing with a compiler.
They guarantee the correctness of the invariants of the Red Black Tree, and they easily replace hundreds of lines of test code which give no guarantee.
We might still need to write tests, but a lot fewer of them. Also, those we write will give us far more "bang for buck" because we can use QuickCheck property testing.
> Note that both of these languages allow shared mutable data, both allow null pointers.
Scala shuns null - and only has it for Java interop. All Scala developers I've discussed this with program as if null did not exist, and never use it to signify lack of a value.
> I think Go occupies a good point along this spectrum, where I can write robust code without arguing with a compiler.
When "arguing with a compiler", you're really being faced with bugs now rather than later, when the code is no longer in your head - or worse, in production. If the type checker rejects your program, it is almost certainly broken, and it is better to "argue with a compiler" than to just compile and get a runtime error later.
Availability of engineers is a good point, though as a Haskeller, I know both companies seeking Haskell employees and Haskellers seeking employment (preferably in Haskell).
Consider the flip-side of the engineers availability is the "Python paradox".
I'm a little confused here. You realize that Go is also statically typed, right? I'm not sure where any debate about dynamic languages started. The points you make about static vs dynamic are valid, just not relavent at the moment.
It's funny, too, how you talk about "implementing a red black tree" like it's an everyday occurrence. I'm guessing you are a teacher/researcher (in which case this entire discussion makes much more sense). On any application team I've worked with (in the valley or out), implementing a binary tree from scratch would require extreme justification and literally have to be the only way possible to solve the problem.
On the dynamic..static axis, Go is much closer to the dynamic side than to Haskell's side.
I am not a teacher or researcher, I am a practicing programmer writing code that is used by critical systems as well as ambitious projects that will (hopefully) be used by many real people.
A red black tree is just an example with invariants that everyone is likely to know, so it's a nice way to illustrate the point about the power of types. Known problems are solved problems, and unsolved problems are unknown problems -- so either my invariants' example will not speak to you because you don't know it, or you will reject it because you can just re-use a library.
I can't remember the last time I implemented a data-structure in a web framework. You just use the built in dictionary/hash table and get on with life.
Well, whenever you write non-trivial code, your code is going to have invariants. These invariants can be partially tested or they can be fully type-checked. The latter is better and cheaper, when available. Haskell makes the latter available far more often, so you don't have to pay for the former. This is not just useful for data structures, but code in general.
I think you are vastly under-estimating the learning cost. We're talking about teams of developers, not a hobby project. A few months * multiple programmers adds up to man-years really quick.
Go is much simpler. We deployed our first production (admittedly a fairly minor piece) Go service under a week after we made the decision to start using Go.
PS: State is only shared when you make it so. Go concepts like channels make it very easy to write, _and debug_ clear, decoupled non-trivial parallel code.
If you have to pay the salaries of programmers for the next 3 years to develop some solution, and know that 10% of that time will be spent learning a new technology that will make them 20%-50% more effective for the remaining 90% of the time. Would you do it or avoid it, based on the large cost of 10% of these programmers' time?
No way in hell OCaml has "better concurrency than Go". Go is built around the concept. Not that OCaml is not an awesome language though, but that's just an outlandish statement.
Since you are replying to this in the Haskell thread - Go clearly performs FAR better than Haskell on these simple benchmarks.
So as far as I can tell, the pros of using Haskell over Go would be
1) More safety from crashes
while the Cons of Haskell would be
1) Slightly slower than Go at HTTP
2) Far, far slower than Go at database queries
3) Much steeper learning curve
4) Based on the history of ML languages, will never be popular. Go is gaining popularity quickly.
I think recommending Haskell to someone for a real project is bad advice from the above. Recommending Haskell to someone for self enrichment is another story, and I can get behind that one.
1. More safety from bugs in general, not just crashes. Haskell programs will generally be more reliable than Go programs.
2. If you look at the Benchmarks game, you will actually see that Haskell beats go there.
I think this benchmark is far narrower than the Benchmarks game and is thus less representative.
3. shouldn't really be a serious consideration for a career programmer (weeks to a couple months of learning to be more effective for years to come is a no-brainer).
4. is untrue, Haskell has already gained more popularity than the ML languages had in the past. And so is F#.
I also challenge your "better concurrency" claim.