notes-computer-programming-programmingLanguageDesign-prosAndCons-haskellProsAndCons

my personal opinion: there's a lot to like about Haskell. I list some of the cons at [1].

toread:

• http://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/Haskell-the-Hard-Way/ / https://www.fpcomplete.com/school/haskell-fast-hard
• http://learnyouahaskell.com/
• Real World Haskell

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toread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4721550

http://neugierig.org/software/blog/2011/10/why-not-haskell.html

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> Haskell and Ruby have continuations

I wonder where this meme of Haskell having continuations started. It pops up here and there, like some mystical incantation that makes the speaker closer to the gods of programming languages.

Haskell has precisely the same continuations JS has, it's just capable of abstracting CPS away. Somewhat.

See http://hackage.haskell.org/pac... . "

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DanWaterworth? 4 days ago

Haskell doesn't have first-class continuations, it has syntactic sugar that allows you to write continuation passing code in a direct style.

reply "

--- http://www.quora.com/Haskell/What-are-the-main-weaknesses-of-Haskell-as-a-programming-language

" What are the main weaknesses of Haskell as a programming language?

Jesse Tov, writes Haskell all day. 92 votes by Marc Bodnick, Omer Zach, Matthew Hill, (more) Haskell’s main technical weakness compared to popular, mainstream languages is probably the lack of a comprehensible cost model. Essentially, laziness makes it difficult to reason about when computation happens, and it can result in serious space leaks. While GHC can produce very efficient code, convincing it to do so in cases where that isn’t the default behavior is a dark art with few real masters. I’ve been writing Haskell for over a decade and using it as my main language at work for at least five years, and I’ve never learned to do this beyond simple cases—mainly because I don’t write code that needs to run efficiently.

There are some other things that are easy in many other languages but difficult in Haskell. For example, purity makes it slightly painful to discover and propagate run-time configuration information. In most languages it’s easy to read a configuration file at startup and store the result in a global variable, but in Haskell that requires dirty tricks.

Haskell has some other weaknesses compared to other academic/research languages. For example, its module system (if you can even call it that) is clearly inferior to Standard ML’s and OCaml’s module systems. Its compile-time meta-programming facility, Template Haskell, is occasionally useful, but it’s a poor substitute for a real, state-of-the art macro system. And of course, there are many things that some languages can do but others can’t. For example, if you want to prove your programs correct, Haskell’s type system, even with recent extensions in that direction, won’t let you prove as much as Coq or Agda—but that’s asking a language to do something that it wasn’t designed for, so I don’t really consider it a valid criticism.

From a theoretical perspective, some people have complained that call-by-need makes Haskell harder to reason about. It’s true that Haskell’s function space is a bit messier what you get in a language that’s both pure and total, but I don’t buy that it’s worse than your standard impure, call-by-value language—it’s just different.

Finally, Haskell does suffer some social weaknesses by being weird and researchy. Hiring large numbers of Haskell programmers is going to be difficult (though the ones you do find are likely to be very good). Because it’s so different from the languages that most people know, it presents a potentially steep learning curve. And of course, the community, while helpful and prodigious, is tiny compared to more popular languages. The variety and quality of libraries available on Hackage is impressive given the number of Haskell programmers out there, but it cannot compete with Java for mindshare. Finally, because Haskell is still very research-oriented, it changes quickly and sometimes unpredictably. I’ve found that my Haskell code breaks and needs to be updated not only for major GHC version increments but often for minor versions as well. This is annoying, but it’s a price I’m willing to pay to program in a beautiful language with top-notch abstraction facilities.

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http://www.yesodweb.com/blog/2011/09/limitations-of-haskell

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 "Namespace clashing, particularly for record fields

data Record = Record {a :: String } data RecordClash? = RecordClash?