Haskell

AI agents, Haskell, and the stubbornness of developers

Recently, I found an article about a member of the Haskell Foundation – who was moving his company away from Haskell. The company built a hardware product with Haskell, and they were moving away reluctantly.

I’m not going to repeat the whole thing here (you can read it yourself, but the TL;DR; is: the Haskell compiler and tooling ecosystem was too slow, and that became a bottleneck now that the LLM agent writing the code is so fast.

Now, let’s be clear: I don’t want to start a holy war about “static versus dynamic typing”, so I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to discuss if the merits of static typing are overrated or not, and I’m not going to discuss if dynamic languages are more or less flexible. This was discussed over and over again – and nobody knows the result. And for me, that in-determination is also a result.

What I am going to talk about is the stubbornness of software developers. It’s something that’s been bothering me for a couple of years now, and it still bothers me today. Looking at this article was no different.
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By Maurício Szabo, ago

There’s a little Haskell in your Javascript

This may seem a little strange, but althrough Javascript is a dynamic language, with very loose typing (automatic convertions, equals signs that only works on arrays/numbers/undefined/nil), lots of things that are “falsy” by default, with the new promise-based approach of Javascript, the language is borrowing some very interesting concepts from Haskell.

And yes, this is a great thing. And yes, this will probably change the way we program.

Let’s begin by talking about Javascript, and its new features. Old async-javascript code was probably like this:

some_io_function(function(result) {
  find_name_in_db(result.person_id, function(name) {
    console.log(name);
  })
});

Now, it’s like this:

some_io_function()
  .then((result) => find_name_in_db(result.person_id))
  .then(console.log)

And, with new ES6 features:

async () => {
  var result = await some_io_function();
  var name = await find_name_in_db(result.person_id);
  console.log(name)
}

Now, what does this have to do with Haskell? Multiple things, but the most important: Functors!
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By Maurício Szabo, ago