Why do I love Haskell more than Ruby?

When I started to learn Ruby, I was excited. It was so great and so easy! The code was readable almost as English and the language allowed me to do everything I wanted. Well, Rails was a bit magical for me, but it was also a very effective. Maybe I did not exactly know why, but it worked and I was able to build an application.

Here am I, two years later, and I still love doing in Ruby. I have a job as a Rails developer, I am learning it in my University … It is basically all I know, but…I slowly start to feel the downsides of this freedom I was so excited about. And I realize it even more and more as I am learning functional programming with Haskell.

I just finished the notorious Learn You a Haskell for a Great Good book, which I got from my boyfriend. First, I read it just because I was curious but then I realized that I really love what I am reading. It was not like learning Ruby at all, it was like learning how to program all over again! I discovered that nothing what I already knew will help me, but it was OK, I was doing it for fun. Then I discovered that there is a certain security, which everyone is talking about and which is actually pretty awesome. Then I discovered math in Haskell and I started to understand it much better, and lastly I discovered how beautifully everything goes together. But step by step.

Haskell is not like any other programming language, or at least not like Ruby.

Haskell syntax is very simple. I do not understand why would anyone say something else. There are just functions which given the same input always return the same output. You can also put function as an argument and get another one as a result!

factorial :: Integer -> Integer factorial n = product [ 1 .. n ]

You see? Nothing tricky about the syntax! Function name and parametres at one side, the implementation on other.. The first line represents type signature, we will speak more about types in a while.

Haskell is lazy, which means that a function argument will not get evaluated until it has to be. This allows us to work with infinite lists, which I think is really cool :) Now you can start to see how different Haskell is from Ruby, but it may not be clear why are these things good. Lets continue.

Haskell uses pattern matching. In your function, you can implement it several times for different patterns and the one which will match will be called.

reverse :: [ a ] -> [ a ] reverse [] = [] reverse ( x : xs ) = reverse xs ++ [ x ]

This example is so elegant! If we put an empty list into this function, the result is also empty list. That is our first pattern. The second pattern says, if we put anything else, we can see it as X and XS, he head and the rest. First element and the other elements. The implementation is than calling recursively the same function but only for the rest - xs and putting the first element to the end of the results.

It is very common in Haskell to treat every possible situation which can occur. It is similar as in Ruby checking if what we got into a function is not an accidental nil, but is more powerful because Haskell will actually tell you if you are not matching all the possible patterns.

One more thing I want to share with you. What happens, when you put 1 argument into a function that takes 2? Well, error? Not in Haskell! You will get a whole new function, which will take the missing argument and only then produce the result.

Safety with types

Yes, Haskell is lazy, it is pure and it has cool pattern matching but the biggest difference from Ruby and the thing I love the most is its type system. It is statically typed, so all the types of your functions and arguments are checked before it is compiled. If the compilation succeeds, your code is most probably correct! What a nice feature to have, I wish someone would tell me if my Ruby code is correct the same way …

Well, someone could say, that to type the types on every variables and every function is tedious and can get you in the way. But not in Haskell! You do not have to explicitly write the types, the compiler can reason about them. Which is nice because it can also tell you when you are not sure.

The best of all is making your own type classes though. Have you ever made a function in Ruby which was expecting for example an User ID but you accidentally send an Report ID instead and was wondering what went wrong? With Haskell you could do a type just for User ID and check if it is passed in. Integers are not all the same!

You can make type classes which supports some behaviour and then concrete instances of these classes. For example:

class Eq a where ( == ) :: a -> a -> Bool ( /= ) :: a -> a -> Bool

Here Eq is a class for things that can be compared if they are equal. Lots of things can do that, so the instances of this class could be Integers, Strings, etc … The function type declaration says that for equal (==), it takes two things of the same type a and return a Bool - true or false. For not equal it is the same.

Type system gives you safety and expresivness - you can build your own types in a several ways, you can just give aliases to existing types, like name instead of string, or you can create a completely new types, like Person type.

Math in Haskell

In ruby, there is no science involved. The closest I get to a science was implementing a sorting algoritm in Ruby, but that can be done in any language. Haskell, on the other hand, feels like science from the beginning. You can find math there, which gives you a feeling of importance and correctness.

If you look at functions, you can already see that they resembles a classical functions much more then those in Ruby. They are pure, this means that they do not have any side effects. There is of course a possibility to do side effects in Haskell, but the important is that it is always separate from the rest.

If you take a look at some of the most common type classes, Functors, Monoids, Applicatives, Monads.. You would see even more math there! You know that Monoid needs to have an associative binary operation and a neutral element. When we put this element as a one argument to this operation, the result of the operation will be the same as the second argument. On another words, the second argument will not change.

For integers, you can make two instances of Monoids, because these rules supports both addition as product. Mempty represents this neutral element, <> represents the operation and it is called mappend . Check it out:

instance ( Num a ) => Monoid ( Product a ) where mempty = Product 1 ( Product a ) <> ( Product b ) = Product ( a * b ) instance ( Num a ) => Monoid ( Sum a ) where mempty = Sum 0 ( Sum a ) <> ( Sum b ) = Sum ( a + b )

If you had done at least some undergraduate math, you should understand these laws as well as others. At least for me everything started to make sense when I realized the connections..Its just like group axioms!

Conclusion

Haskell is very different, many would say that it is hard to learn or that its syntax is not friendly. I disagree. Learning Haskell is in a way much easier than learning Ruby, just because there are boundries and walls which you must obey. Too much freedom is demanding, one must think all the time about possible outcomes, about hundreds of possible ways how to implement something. In Haskell, if you take a look at the type signatires, you often know the implementation right away, because there is just one way how to do it. For beginners, it is much clearer and easier, not to mention the amazing type system which gives you all the power. Anyway, I just love Haskell!

Comments