alt Hacker NewsThe only complaint against Haskell was about long compilation times.
I agree that short compilation times are very desirable, but I do not see why Python must be the solution for that.
I do not know whether Haskell can be compiled quickly, but from my experience, I am very certain that short compilation times are easily achievable for languages with good static type checking, especially with compilers that have different options that allow choosing between fast compilation and heavily optimized compilation.
An optimized compilation may require a much longer time than a fast compilation, but that has no relationship with the programming language used in the source text, but only with the intermediate representation used by the compiler and the target CPU ISA. Usually, if you compare the compilation times of multiple programming languages, all the compilation times with fast compilation options are much shorter than all the times with high-optimization options, so the programming language choice may be less important than the chosen compiler and its command-line options.
When you try to optimize a project by generating many variants with a LLM, I doubt that all those variants will be generated from scratch, completely independently, even if only for the reason that when using a commercial LLM the cost of a completely new variant will be much higher, by requiring many more tokens, so whenever possible it is preferable to generate other variants by just patching previous variants.
Whenever a variant is generated by editing a previous variant, incremental compilation can be used, which should be pretty much instant on modern computers.
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Sounds a bit like surrender here.
There's no reason to read the code anymore.
The LLMs produce it inhumanly fast.
They can usually debug and fix problems faster than Haskell can compile the project.
Meanwhile the open source communities are in basic denial about AI, so trying to change things by making compilation faster or advancing a Haskell interpreter are going to meet with fierce resistance.
Whatever. Give up. Just ship Python.
I sympathize.
> The only complaint against Haskell was about long compilation times.
There is also this
> How do we make library docs full of copy-pastable, realistic examples, not just beautiful types?
Which is useful for humans as well as agents.
Haskell indeed has a very bad track record of documenting its libraries. For many people, just having the function signatures is documentation enough.
Rust is equally bad at compile times (if not worse) but its standards for documentation is at another level