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Simon Peyton Jones - Haskell is useless

bunidanoable

330 subscribers • 1 video on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 4 people: 2 on Hacker News, 1 on Lobsters and 1 in engineering communities.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2012 to 2024.
  • Presented by Simon Peyton Jones, co-designer of Haskell

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

385K views14 years ago4 recommendations

Programming languagesSoftware designFunctional programmingLanguage design and type systems

Simon Peyton Jones explains the trade-offs between pure functional programming and side effects, and how mainstream and functional languages converge.

Simon Peyton Jones talking about the future of programming languages

Why it's here

4 people recommend this, 1 disputes it

What people say. Frequently cited by engineers to illustrate the core philosophy of Haskell's purity and the trade-offs of side effects in language design.

Moments people linked to

zod000on Lobsters • Recommends

Simon Peyton Jones - Haskell is useless
32View on Lobsters

u/gypsyfacein r/haskell • Recommends

Simon Peyton Jones - Haskell is useless
29View on Reddit

ernst_klimon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Was Rust Worth It?”

…munity is "use handlers instead of pointers", but this gives you, surprise surprise, manual resource management alike that in C, and the compiler won't help much. Of course this is all subjective but for me the ergonomics of Rust is far too bad. It's a good step in right direction along with ATS, but I really hope we could do better than this. 1 link to this video…
View on Hacker News

ReleaseCandidaton Hacker News • Recommends

On “Gerald Sussman: Programming is (should be) fun (2022) [video]”

That must of course be "Haskell is useless" link to this video But apart from that, his enthusiasm can even make the mseemingly most boring topic interesting. I'd personally start either at "the story of Haskell" Escape from the Ivory Tower link Or something more recent, about Epic's Verse link
View on Hacker News

theohon Hacker News • Disputes

On “ML Family Workshop”

…e of the abstracts talks about a "classless society" as a pun relating to object orientation. This makes me groan a bit, as there seems to be a general tendency in FP to make superficial quips, puns or observations like this while the community of FP programmers remains totally divorced from reality. A good example is the notorious video interview link to this video in which Simon Peyton Jones laments the fact that pure functional programming languages just make the CPU heat up and nothing else (i.e. they have no useful side effects.) He probably wasn't being completely ingenuous but it comes across as a lack of self-awareness: FP is all about calculation and expressions, the program is an input and th…
View on Hacker News

u/gelisamin r/haskell • Mentions

On “Are Monads a Waste of Time?”

I think the author is simply confused about the purpose of Monads. They seem to think that Haskell claims that monadic computations improve upon imperative computations. Starting from this incorrect assumption, they compare the syntax of both, find them very similar, and conclude that there is no improvement after all. They then ask if a different syntax, in which the state-passing is explicit, would be an actual improvement, or if it would be worse. Answer: it would be worse. Haskell did not start from the imperative syntax and semantics, but from the explicit state-passing syntax, which can only express `State`-like computations, not `ST` and `IO`-like computations. The imperative syntax…
23View on Reddit

u/peafein r/haskell • Mentions

On “Why Haskell is missing in Stack Overflow Survey 2019?”

Check this out, Simon Peyton Jones answered himself. The tl;dr is the other bunch of languages in production niches is moving slowly towards Haskell and imbibe its features, but not vice versa.
19View on Reddit

u/Martinsosin r/haskell • Mentions

…I was looking to refresh the list of motivating materials that should convince the reader that it is worth learning Haskell, but I had a bit of trouble finding relatively new materials. Therefore, I would appreciate any suggestions! Here are the materials we have so far in the announcement : >We suggest you start by watching this video: > >[video > >Then have a look at these posts and discussions: > >https://serokell.io/blog/10-reasons-to-use-haskell > >http://stackoverflow.com/questions/775726/whats-the-fuss-about > >http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3175656/why-should-i-want-to-learn-haskell > >If you want to know more about the basic motivation behind Haskell…
18View on Reddit

u/scalabilityin r/haskell • Mentions

On “Why are haskell applications so obscure?”

Haskell wasn't meant to be a practical language. Simon Peyton Jones explains the approach here: link to this video tl;dr: The ideal language is useful and safe. Other languages were designed to be useful, and tried to add some safety on top. Haskell was designed to be safe, and tried to add some usefulness on top. The industry has benefited a lot from the discoveries made via this approach, and seeing what other languages can't do really changes how you think of programming, and how you write code in those other languages. However, if you want to get the job done, there's usually a more suitable language than Haskell.
16View on Reddit

u/Martinsosin r/haskell • Mentions

On “Should I consider using Haskell?”

…ng of programming and forever enrich it with new concepts. That's also why it's hard to give a satisfying answer to this question, when the question comes from someone who doesn't yet know Haskell, while someone who already knows it doesn't need an answer anymore. Huh, an epistemological conundrum! We suggest you start by watching this video: * [video Then have a look at these posts and discussions: * https://serokell.io/blog/10-reasons-to-use-haskell * http://stackoverflow.com/questions/775726/whats-the-fuss-about * http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3175656/why-should-i-want-to-learn-haskell If you want to know more about the basic motivation behind Haskell and functional programmin…
8View on Reddit

u/tormentingin r/haskell • Mentions

On “"[The Haskell] community can feel cold and uninviting" (A blog post praising the Rust community)”

Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration, don't you think? It's also not really relevant, since we're talking about the community, not the language itself. Simon Peyton Jones says that Haskell is useless. link to this video
5View on Reddit

u/badfoodmanin r/haskell • Mentions

On “Elm language and Haskell”

…ample, and since Java 8 there's been a huge push to make Java better suited for functional operations. Most imperative languages are finding ways to make effect-free programming styles more available, and most functional languages are trying to make IO operations easier to deal with. The convergence of language goals is pretty well described here: link to this video Basically, there's no reason to really think of one as better than the other, but certain languages are definitely better suited to certain domains. As for Elm vs. Haskell, they are indeed quite similar. As someone else pointed out, the compiler is actually written in Haskell. That doesn't mean that Elixir or Clojure is similar to Haskell.…
5View on Reddit

u/_populousin r/compsci • Mentions

On “One language to rule them all?(This is a fun/dumb question)”

The perfect language may be a mix between Haskell and C(++) features. No sarcasm. Here is a fascinating implementation of this idea.
4View on Reddit

u/P3riapsisin r/functionalprogramming • Mentions

On “C programmer here. I have some questions about functional programming.”

compulsory link to my favourite video "Haskell is Useless" link to this video The FP community is so fun
4View on Reddit

u/psygnisfivein r/haskell • Mentions

On “Simon Peyton Jones - Haskell is useless ”

Actually SPJ is saying "is". > And down here safe and useless is Haskell. link to this video
4View on Reddit

u/annonimusonein r/haskell • Mentions

On “Haskell…”

I am only a poser, but I thought it had something to do with Haskell’s inherent “uselessness”?
4View on Reddit