What killed Haskell, could kill Rust, too
My personal experience with Haskell hackers went like this:<p>-I used to hang out at lambda-the-ultimate, in which haskell was considered god sent and c++ a toy language. At the time, I was heavy into writing simulation software, which meant c++ all the way, so I tried to understand haskell and its advantages over c++, but my attempts ended up being mocked. I stopped visiting that site.<p>-I tried to open some debates about Haskell on reddit, where someone told me they will answer my haskell questions only if I told them a specific mathematical definition on some properties of functions. I didn&#x27;t know the reply, I was a programmer after all, not a mathematician. Said person left me in the cold.<p>-again on reddit, I was trying the debate the usefulness of haskell regarding simulation software, which relies heavily on updating variables, but I never got straight answers. To this day, I still do not know if haskell code actually can update variables in place or it only simulates updating of variables. Someone suggested using lens, and although I understand the abstraction, it still has not solved my question if haskell can update variables in place.<p>Why I was so interested in this aspect, i.e. in place updating? I wrote simulation software and after that game software for a living, and it matters to me because I want to be able to reason about the performance of my program. I don&#x27;t want to have data be duplicated behind my back.<p>To cut the long story short, my haskell questions go unanswered to this day, I was very disappointed, and since I have great experience in imperative programming languages, I usually write programs that are correct as soon as they are compiled, which is what the haskell advantage is supposed to be. So I don&#x27;t see any benefit from haskell, and I won&#x27;t recommend it to my company or my colleagues.<p>Am I wrong regarding haskell? perhaps, but I am not interested any more in &#x27;trying out&#x27; languages of dubious gains, nor am I interested in dealing with juvenile behaviors. I tried Rust because it had a serious advantage over C++ (namely, object lifetimes), and I will recommend Rust, but my patience for and interest in haskell is virtually non-existent at this point.