Normal_Anomaly comments on How has lesswrong changed your life? - Less Wrong Discussion
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May I ask what is the utility of Haskell? Or rather, in what field it has one? Functional programming as a shortcut is great, but Python has that covered. Even C# LINQ has that covered, for most pragmatic functional programming is about writing domain-specific query languages, as a lot of complicated programming can be reduced to input - massage the data - output. The rest often just library-juggling. As opposed to this pragmatically functional stuff, purely functional programming is largely about avoiding bugs of certain types, but in my experience 95% of bugs come from not of those types, but from misunderstanding requirements or requirements themselves being sloppy and chaotic. Pure functionality is largely about programming like a mathemathician, strictly formal and everything the result of reasoning instead of just cobbling things together by trial and error which tends to characterize most programming, but the kind of bugs this formalist attitude cuts down on is not really the kinds of bugs that actually annoy users. So I wonder what utility you found to Haskell.
I'm taking a class in Haskell, and I'd really like to know this too. Haskell is annoying. It's billed as "not verbose", but it's so terse that reading other people's code and learning from it is difficult. (Note: the person I'm on a project with likes one-letter variable names, so that's a bit of a confounder.)
That sounds like math! :) I suck at math precisely due to lack of verbosity, as I am more used to reading essays than equations my brain is used to reading fast and filtering out large chunks of what I read. This shallowness works very well for reviewing philosophy, but in math just missing one letter leads to not understanding it.
This is, weirdly, how I know that much of programming is applied math it does not feel so to me. In programming, it is a taboo to call some variable a Greek letter instead of calling it UnitPriceIncludingTax. This leads to me reading code easy and reading math badly.