Skip to content
Hallway
0:00 / 0:00

#haskell#simonpeytonjones#purefunctionalprogramming

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.

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/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/_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/cadit_in_piscinamin r/ProgrammingLanguages • Mentions

On “Pointless: a scripting language for learning and fun (https://ptls.dev)”

Haha I figured that if Haskell was "useless" then a "Pointless" language would be a good counterpart
3View on Reddit

tikhonjon Hacker News • Mentions

On “.NET: So long and thanks for all the fish”

I was particularly thinking about things like order and group in list comprehensions1. Turns out the paper introducing them was actually from 2007, so maybe it's not that recent :). (I thought it was newer than that.) 1: link Here is a random video I found earlier where SPJ talks both about this in particular and the exchange of ideas between Haskell and .NET in general: link to this video
View on Hacker News

Raphael_Amiardon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Rob Pike: Go at Google”

I think Simon Peyton Jones says it best about Haskell : link to this video He says Haskell is useless. Without even debating that (it can certainly be useful for certain classes of programming problems), you can see his point : The goal of Haskell was to start from an ideal view (pure functional programming without side effects) and try and see how to make that eventually practical for everyday programming, without sacrificing the pure core of the language . You have languages, like F# (or even C# !) that takes lessons from Haskell, with at the same time being practical for pretty much every programming task (their platform , .Net, makes them useless for a lot of use cases, but that is another problem)…
View on Hacker News

lukasederon Hacker News • Mentions

On “What's wrong with Object-Oriented Programming and Functional Programming”

Sign. Yet another discussion full of trolling pros and cons of FP vs. OO Guys, listen to Simon Peyton Jones himself: "Haskell is useless". He's discussing stuff with Erik Meijer in this video: link to this video
View on Hacker News

ZenoArrowon Hacker News • Mentions

On “ML Family Workshop”

"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.)" You're not the first person I've seen that's misunderstood this video, I can only guess at why... One thing it's probably worth remembering is that Haskell has been a research platform for many years, and some of the Haskell features that people take for granted today did not exist in earlier versions. SPJ is not saying that Haskell is useless now, but it was close to useless for creating programs for a number of years. As a case in point, try to imagine Haskell wit…
View on Hacker News

tempodoxon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Kronos Haskell”

Simon Peyton Jones himself does not count Haskell among the “useful” languages (Simon Peyton Jones - Haskell is useless): link to this video
View on Hacker News

Arnoron Hacker News • Mentions

On “Announcing Rust 1.0”

Awesome! I assume you intentionally released this on a Friday just to eat up everyone's weekends :) Thanks for the hard work. As I dig in, I'm hoping that Rust will fit in the "useful and safe" sweet spot in Simon Peyton Jones's diagram here: link to this video
View on Hacker News

aninhumeron Hacker News • Mentions

On “Strategic Scala Style: Principle of Least Power”

>Maybe 'aninhumer has a point - restricting the language is kind of the opposite goal of making it expressive/powerful. My point was more that safety is a separate, important metric of language quality. It often conflicts with expressiveness, but not necessarily. See also SPJ's "Haskell is Useless" video: link to this video
View on Hacker News