I would have tweeted this, but it’s a bit longer than 140 chars :)
I was recently going through some articles about Go’s limitations, and stumbled on this HN comment:
It’s ironic that the “better” the language (for some hazy definition of “better”) the less actual work seems to get done with it.
So Go can be pretty annoying at times, and so can Java (I’ve said before that I find the two almost identical, but that’s beside the point now); and C is horrible and completely unsafe and downright dangerous.
Yet more useful working code has probably been written in Java and C than all other languages combined since the invention of the computer, and more useful code has been written in, what, 5 years of Go(?) than in 20(?) years of Haskell.
Here’s the thing: I am willing to accept that Haskell is the best programming language ever created. People have been telling me this for over 15 years now. And yet it seems like the most complex code written in Haskell is the Haskell compiler itself (and maybe some tooling around it).
If Haskell’s clear advantages really make that much of a difference, maybe its (very vocal) supporters should start doing really impressive things with it rather than write compilers. I don’t know, write a really safe operating system; a novel database; some crazy Watson-like machine; a never-failing hardware controller. Otherwise, all of this is just talk.
Cheers!