hython VS dhall

This really resonates with me.

I’ve been using it in a decidedly industrial application for about 1.5 years now. I had some fairly significant experience with it prior (https://github.com/mattgreen/hython).

For the first time in a long time (20 years experience) I’ve needed to learn a significant amount of things. It’s a combo of the domain and the language. It’s rather exhilarating, and also exhausting. Could also be a lot to bite off on with a busy home life too.

Regardless, the language is brilliant. My manager exhorts me to generally write in a top-down manner a lot because Haskell’s flexibility really conveys dev intent well, so think hard about how it should read, and start from there. This is a huge mindset shift from most langs, where you can feel your brain shut off to save cycles as you type “function” over and over. It really feels like it is meant to be write-friendly. Point-free functions are wonderfully terse to write. I joke that TH is my favorite language: a type-checked macro language that lets me write almost anything I want.

And there’s the rub: even with controlled effects via monads, the syntax is still hard for me to scan and read. I don’t know if this comes eventually or what, but this feels like a function of how dense a line could be. I miss early return dearly, and understand why it isn’t a thing (except if you have a MonadZero at hand) but I know it’s a syntactic transformation that won’t make it in. I really miss the amazing Rust LSP. Haskell’s recently lost the ability to flesh out pattern matches due to Haskell internals shifting with 9.x. I still hate and screw up stacking monads. Compile times can be brutal, esp if you hit the lens library.

I really think the community is one of the strongest group of programmers I’ve already seen. I don’t want to belabor this and dwell on the big brain memes, it’s more that they think hard on this stuff and actually push forward, vs just telling each other that web frameworks are rocket science and it’s impossible to do better than what it exists.

Ultimately, Haskell fits like a glove for our domain of program analysis. Beyond that, I’d still be a bit wary. I’m still thirsty for a PL that is essentially OCaml but with a better syntax. But that’s just me.

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If you mean installing Dhall's dependencies (https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-haskell/blob/master/dhal...), those aren't too crazy, but they're definitely not all "beginner level". Template Haskell in particular is quite heavyweight.

Ok, lets be specific. Lets write a comment to explain this function:

https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-haskell/blob/master/dhal...

I haven't tried it but apparently you can compile to Nix from Dhall:

> You can use this compiler to program Nix using the Dhall language. This package targets people who wish Nix had a type system.

https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-haskell/tree/master/dhal...

If the problem is the syntax and people wants some other format that compiles to nix, there's dhall

https://dhall-lang.org/

https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-haskell/tree/master/dhal...

https://www.haskellforall.com/2017/01/typed-nix-programming-...

Dhall is a generic config language with some programming capabilities (but not turing complete) that can compile to json, yaml, and other formats, like in this instance nix.

For my GSoC project, I built from scratch the dhall-csv package on the Dhall Haskell implementation Github Repository. Said package provides two executables, dhall-to-csv (which converts Dhall files into CSV files) and csv-to-dhall (which converts CSV files into Dhall files). It also provides Haskell libraries with the functions that translate bidirectionally between Dhall and CSV.

> If you add constraints (like not being able to feed the program to itself as is done in the halting problem and not allowing unbounded loops) then it is possible to determine if a program will terminate or not.

Dhall is a good example - https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-haskell .

See also https://dhall-lang.org/

That just seems like an even greater nightmare to me. Soon you would have to learn to read and understand a custom program in a Turing-complete language for each and every installation.

The proper solution is a DSL, just a better DSl. Or perhaps a DSL embedded in something like dhall <https://dhall-lang.org/>, but definitely not a general-purpose programming language.

Dhall