Python

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

Goodbye, Chlorine. And welcome, Lazuli!

So, if you’re not familiar with Chlorine, or any of my tooling, let me get you a refresher. If you don’t want to read it all, the TL;DR; is – Chlorine is a Socket REPL plug-in for the Clojure, and ClojureScript languages. It also supports nREPL, although to a lesser extend, and it works on the Atom editor. It also contains a VSCode version called Clover, and I tried to port it to NeoVIM and I called it Clematis.

And now, it’s gone.

For historical reasons, I wanted to rename the project for a while – so that Chlorine would stay as a “socket REPL for the Atom editor” and the new plug-in would be the “Chlorine:Next” or something like this. I tried to like the name Alya, but in the end I never did…

… and then, I stopped working with Clojure. Like, at all. For a while I haven’t touched a single line of Clojure code, although I still use ClojureScript on my personal plug-ins. But ClojureScript have a weird problem – I can’t develop two plug-ins written in ClojureScript at the same time, so I need to compile everything, except for one, plug-in for “release”. Which is annoying to say the least, so that’s why I started the “Star Ring” metapackage – to make all plug-ins a “single, unified codebase”. Unfortunately, this have its own fractal of problems that I won’t discuss now.

So not that I’m now working with Ruby, I needed better tooling for Ruby otherwise I would go crazy. Leaving the “REPL-Driven Development” of Clojure behind is a nightmare, because it’s such a great tool and it somehow “grows” in you in such a way that you can’t imagine working in a codebase when you can’t evaluate your code all the time. And that’s where Lazuli appears… but again, because of the problems with not being able to develop Lazuli and Chlorine at the same time, Chlorine’s development stalled… and I decided to stop working on it to work in Lazuli.
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By Maurício Szabo, ago