The Cult Classic of Programming Languages: Haskell’s Intellectual Allure
A Daunting Task and a Menacing Language
Fresh out of college, I was tasked with rewriting a search page’s autocomplete feature, buried in a decrepit codebase that others avoided like the plague. The plan was to rebuild it using TypeScript, a JavaScript dialect, leveraging a library with features from a language called Haskell.
Haskell. The name evoked images of a formidable weapon, like a claymore or a naginata. Its harsh Germanic consonants, reminiscent of Schopenhauer or Heidegger, added an air of intimidation. All I knew was that it was a challenging language, designed for mathematical prodigies.
Diving into the Haskell Rabbit Hole
While knowledge of Haskell wasn’t strictly necessary for the rewrite, I was an overzealous graduate eager to take on any challenge, no matter how unwarranted. Armed with a whimsically titled tutorial book, Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!, I spent that winter immersed in Haskell after work. It felt like learning to program from scratch.
The Birth of Haskell: From Theoretical Concepts to Practical Tool
Long before Haskell became a programming language, it existed as a collection of theoretical concepts. In 1977, computer scientist John Backus delivered a pivotal lecture, “Can Programming Be Liberated From the Von Neumann Style?” He argued that existing languages were becoming bloated and ineffective, calling for the evolution of “functional programming” from mathematical esoterica to a practical tool.
Imperative vs. Functional Programming: A Dichotomy
Programming paradigms are broadly categorized into “imperative programming” and “functional programming.” While the distinction isn’t always clear-cut, as more languages support both styles, it can be simplified as follows: in imperative programming, you write code as a series of steps, line by line; in functional programming, you define mathematical functions and let the machine handle the steps. Imperative programming is far more prevalent in terms of functionality and usage.
The Forging of Haskell: A Language Born from Mathematics
Before Haskell, researchers had implemented functional concepts in various languages. However, in the late 1980s, a group of computer scientists united to distill these concepts into a single language. They named it after logician-mathematician Haskell Curry, whose work is foundational to programming language theory. (Originally, they planned to name it Curry but realized it would be susceptible to bad culinary puns.) The Haskell committee aimed to eliminate the messy excess of imperative programming using advanced mathematics, design a new framework guided by logic, and assemble everything using modern compiling techniques. From this scorching forge, Haskell 1.0 emerged.
Haskell’s Enigmatic Syntax and Concise Elegance
Haskell looked unlike anything I had ever encountered. Cryptic symbols (>>=, <$>, :<:, <|>) abounded. The syntax was almost offensively terse. The Fibonacci sequence, which can span multiple lines in other languages, can be written as a one-liner shorter than most sentences in this article:
fibs = 0 : 1 : zipWith (+) fibs (tail fibs)You might as well conclude each Haskell program with “QED.”
Haskell’s Conciseness: A JSON Parser in Under 100 Lines
Whenever I learn a new language, I start by writing a JSON parser, which converts a common web application data format into a computer-manipulable structure. While my C parser was a programmatic monstrosity spanning over a thousand lines, I felt a thrill of satisfaction when Haskell allowed me to achieve the same in under a hundred.
The Monad Enigma and Haskell’s Reputation
I quickly understood why Haskell was—and remains—a language more admired than used. Even one of its most basic concepts, the “monad,” has spawned a cottage industry of explainers, analogies, and videos. A notoriously unhelpful explanation, famous enough to be autocompleted by Google, goes:
A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors.
The language is also more despised than explored. Steve Yegge, a popular curmudgeon blogger of yesteryear, once wrote a satirical post about how the Haskell community had finally found the one “industry programmer who gives a shit about Haskell.” For programmers like Yegge, Haskell is synonymous with an overintellectualized, impractical language with little industry applicability.
Haskell: A Cult Classic of Programming Languages
What Yegge failed to grasp is that using Haskell is seldom a pragmatic decision. It is an intellectual, even aesthetic, choice. At its core, Haskell has more in common with the films of Wes Anderson than other programming languages: highly cerebral, charmingly quirky, and oddly refined; appreciated by those in the know and dismissed by outsiders as pretentious. Haskell is, one might say, a cult classic.
The Paradox of Great Programming Languages
Haskell’s lack of widespread adoption illustrates a paradoxical truth in software engineering: Great programming languages aren’t always great for programming.
Haskell is not inherently more difficult to learn than C, but the two languages present different challenges. Writing in C is like precision engineering, demanding the attention of a skilled watchmaker. Haskell code, on the other hand, is essentially code-shaped mathematical expressions. C is a quintessential engineer’s language. Haskell is a pure mathematician’s.
The Industry’s Not-So-Well-Kept Secret: Programmers and Math
A good engineer’s and a good mathematician’s aptitudes don’t always overlap. The industry’s not-so-well-kept secret is that most programmers aren’t as good at math or logic as you might think. This is mostly fine. After all, many doctors would make poor molecular biologists, few lawyers are legal philosophers, and the great majority of MBAs know zilch about econometrics. But this means few programmers can really master Haskell. This includes me, of course, whose legs weaken at the sight of such expressions as “F-coalgebra” and “typeclass metaprogramming.”
Haskell: Style Over Matter
Still, when I think about Haskell, a line about Vladimir Nabokov’s prose comes to mind: ”the primacy he gives to style over matter.” Haskell programmers are style supremacists, and it’s nothing to apologize for. In an industry often fixated on utility and expediency, the Haskell community should not feel obligated to summon evidence of its usefulness. Instead, it should simply retort: What’s the problem with useless intellectual exercises?
The Enduring Influence of Haskell
Because the thing about useless exercises is they don’t stay useless for long. Even when “industry programmers” shunned Haskell, language designers took note. In recent years, a Haskell-style paradigm has come into vogue because of the treasury of benefits it offers: rendering certain categories of bugs impossible by design, making a program’s correctness more provable, and enabling easy parallel computation. Some of the most anticipated updates featured in new versions of imperative languages are those inspired by functional programming. In the end, Backus’ anti–von Neumann plea was heard. Programming has been liberated.
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