Comment by crabbone
3 months ago
I would recommend neither of those.
Haskell has very bad syntax (with extensive backing from Microsoft, iirc the guy who writes the compiler is a Microsoft's Research employee).
F# is a straight-up Microsoft's language.
It doesn't matter what other benefits it has. Just don't touch anything created by that company, and you will have one fewer regrets in your life.
But, if you still want a language from that category: SML or Erlang would be my pick.
SPJ has left MSR and is now at Epic games, working on a new PL. However, even while he was at MSR, MS didn't really have a say in how Haskell was developed.
Well, MS didn't have to do anything. It's enough that they have (or had) the opportunity to do something.
There isn't an Overmind in MS that in a creepy voice tells you to spawn more overlords. Less than that, there doesn't need to be a written document that tells you to give money to MS or your data etc. There's just a general accepted understanding among the people who run that company that ends justify the means. And by "ends" they mean them and their investors getting rich.
If Haskell compiler could've been turned into a money-making machine, and it only required killing off half of Haskell programmer, MS would be working overtime on the plan to hide the bodies, but they'd never even consider the possibility of killing being bad... (metaphorically speaking, hopefully)
Do you also suspect homicidal money making motives behind Z3, Lean, and F*? It seems more likely to me that they just want some useful knowledge out of these projects that they can integrate into a product that actually sells.
1 reply →
What's wrong with Haskell's syntax? I think it's generally pretty nice though can be excessively terse at times.
* Significant white space, and the rules around whitespace are very convoluted.
* There's no pattern or regularity to how infix / prefix / suffix operators are used which makes splitting program text into self-contained sub-programs virtually impossible if you don't know the exact behavior, including priority of each operator.
* There's a tradition of exceptionally bad names for variables, inherited from the realm of mathematical formulas. In mathematics, it's desirable to give variables names devoid of everyday meaning to emphasize the generic nature of the idea being expressed. This works in the context of very short formulas, but breaks entirely in the context of programs which are usually many orders of magnitude bigger than even the largest formula you've ever seen. There, having meaningful names is a life west.
* It's impossible to make a good debugger for Haskell because of the language being "lazy". Debuggers are essential tools that help programmers in understanding the behavior of their programs. Haskell programmers are forced to rely on their imagination when explaining to themselves how their program works.
* Excessive flexibility. For example, a Haskell programmer may decide to overload string literals (or any literals for that matter). This is orders of magnitude worse than eg. overloading operators in C++, which is criticizes for defying expectations of the reader.
One of these points would've been enough for me to make the experience of working with a language unpleasant. All of them combined is a lot more than unpleasant.
From the point of view of writing a parser, Haskell's whitespace syntax seems like a hack. So, the grammar is defined with braces and semicolons, and to implement significant whitespace, the lexer inserts opening braces and semicolons at the start of each line according to some layout rules. That's not the hacky part; what makes it a hack is that to insert closing braces, the lexer inserts a closing brace when the parser signals an error. You can read about it here [0].
Also, on an aesthetic level, I think a lot of infix operators are kind of ugly. Examples include (<$>), ($), and (<*>). I think Haskell has too many infix operators. This is probably a result of allowing user-definable operators. I do like how you can turn functions into infix operators using backticks, though (e.g. "f x y" can be written as "x `f` y").
[0]: https://amelia.how/posts/parsing-layout.html
> Just don't touch anything created by that company, and you will have one fewer regrets in your life.
:-)