My problem with haskell

· dghaehre

#haskell #programming

# I love haskell

I love haskell! It has a special place in my heart where I often feel like it is the perfect language. Even though I have written a fair amount of haskell code, I still consider myself a beginner haskeller, so there are still plenty to learn. But I have found a problem with haskell, which I struggle to come to terms with.

There are trivial/standard haskell concepts I still struggle to fully understand, but this is not really the problem I have with haskell. The problem is the feedback loop when you are working on something you dont fully understand. Making the program compile and do what you want can take a long time! Rust, which is sometimes loosely compared to Haskell, also has a scrict compiler that can make it very time consuming to get the program to even compile. But the rust feedback loop is a lot nicer. You are often able to make incremental changes that makes it feel like you are making progress. This might sound like a trivial difference, but for myself this makes a huge difference. I very rarely have multiple hours to spend on a side project, which means that if I want to program for 30 minutes I want to feel somewhat productive in that time. The risk I am always taking when starting writing haskell on a side project, is that I will feel like I have gotten nothing done.

I am at the moment very motivated to get over this "hump" with haskell, but I am still not sure how to deal with this. I can only take x amount of short programming sessions where I write zero lines of code.