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Reading lots on Haskell recently I’m beginning to feel like it’s very cool from the CS point of view, but too overcomplicated from the practical one. And all attempts to prove otherwise, as far as I think of them, have failed.

I mean, you can definitely write a useful Haskell application but isn’t the cost too high? Isn’t after all its type system too restrictful? Doesn’t messing with ErrorT IO seem to be much ado about nothing?

Yes, it’s cool when you can reason about your programs in almost mathematical sense. It’s great that you can model the domain with types. It’s nice to have lazy pure code… But when you come to side-effects, stateful computation, error handling, &c simultaneously… Well it starts to feel wrong. Just wrong.

All these are just my thoughts based on short time of learning it. Maybe I’m just too stupid. Maybe I will have this “a-ha!” with Haskell sometime so everything will seem natural to me. But maybe Haskell is just too overcomplicated for actual programming.

It feels like Haskell is actually like maths. Mathematics is all very consistent, you can reason about anything there, you can prove theorems, but when things get complicated they get REALLY complicated. And there is no shortcuts or something like that. And as even tensors don’t fit in my head really well, Haskell may not too.

Think of it like having a programmer to study algebraic geometry for example. Though Haskell seems to be lots easier.