Thoughts and clarifications

Posted Sep 22, 2024 18:24 UTC (Sun) by Rudd-O (guest, #61155)
In reply to: Thoughts and clarifications by pizza
Parent article: Whither the Apple AGX graphics driver?

> Rust will have its Eternal September, when relatively average-to-mediocre corporate body farms start cranking it out. At that point, "Rust Culture" goes out the window as the only "culture" that matters is what falls out of coroporate metrics<->reward mappings.

I haven't seen so far, at least in decades of me working in the industry, that eternal September has arrived to Haskell.

And I don't think that's going to happen. At least in Haskell. Maybe in Rust will. Maybe it won't.

There is a set of conceptual difficulties associated with learning any programming language, and it is not the same, depending on the language. Learning ATARI basic is one thing, (by the way that's the first language I learned). Learning Python is another Learning assembly is yet another Learning Haskell is another.

To pull the conversation away from the realm of language and just talk about concepts, pretty much any programmer can program using a stringly typed interface (which we all know leads to shitty code). But not every programmer is capable of learning the Haskell type system (I know I can't but ikcan understand how it leads to improved type safety and thus code quality).

All of this is to say that we're not all made equal. And because we're not all made equal, we are not all able to use the same tools. Just as we are not all able to wield a sledgehammer that weighs 30 pounds and break down a wall, so we are just as unequal to wield a specific programming language with skill and produce the results that one wants. Evolution does not stop at the neck.

But what do i know? Perhaps Haskell will get its eternal September? All i know is i can't learn it. Or at least I'm humble enough to admit that.

Thoughts and clarifications

Posted Sep 22, 2024 18:30 UTC (Sun) by Rudd-O (guest, #61155) [Link]

Addendum:

In case it's interesting for the readers here, the current firm I'm working at started the system that we are developing with Haskell. We had a lot of researchers that were super talented and were able to crank out what I consider pretty high quality code at the very beginning using nothing but Haskell.

The problem is that once you need to grow past 10 engineers, or in this case computer scientists, you can't. Finding 10 Haskell programmers in a Haskell conference is fairly easy. Finding the 11th to join your team when there's no conference going on is almost impossible. Hasklers are wicked smart, and because they're wicked smart, they're wicked rare.

So what did we do after that? We switched our system to Rust. Of course, the system continues to have the same type structure to the extent that it is possible, that it had back in the era when it started as Haskell. And all the Haskell programmers quickly adapted to using Rust because the type system in Rust is less complex than the type system in Haskell, so for them it was a downgrade. But we were able to quickly triple the amount of programmers that we had developing the system.

And the system continues to grow, and it has pretty high code quality for the standards of my career — I've seen code maybe 25 years? I routinely refactor the innards of the system without fearing that I'm going to break something somewhere else, somewhere deep in the system. I don't think I've ever felt so free to actually change the code without having the dread inside of me that it's going to catastrophically explode in production. Two years, and I have yet to put a bug in the system. That is almost completely magical.