> You get this for free in Haskell,

Oh, my favorite part of the orange site, that's why we come here, that's the 'meat of HN' - language tribalism with a technical veneer. Congratulations, not only you said something as lame as: "French doesn't need the subjunctive mood because German has word order rules that already express uncertainty", but you're also incorrect factually.

Haskell's laziness gives you fusion-like memory behavior on lists for free. But transducers solve a broader problem - portable, composable, context-independent transformations over arbitrary reducing processes - and that you don't get for free in Haskell either.

Transducers exist because Clojure is strict, has a rich collection library, and needed a composable abstraction over reducing processes that works uniformly across collections, channels, streams, and anything else that can be expressed as a step function. They're a solution to a specific problem in a specific context.

Haskell's laziness exists because the language chose non-strict semantics as a foundational design decision, with entirely different consequences - both positive (fusion, elegant expression of infinite structures) and negative (space leaks, reasoning difficulty about resource usage).

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instig007 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Haskell's laziness gives you fusion-like memory behavior on lists for free.

Haskell laziness & fusion isn't limited to lists, you can fuse any lawful composition of functions applied over data with the required lawful instances used for the said composition. There's no difference to what transducers are designed for.

> But transducers solve a broader problem - portable, composable, context-independent transformations over arbitrary reducing processes - and that you don't get for free in Haskell either.

Transducers don't solve a broader problem, it's the same problem of reducing complexities of your algorithims by eliminating transient data representations. If you think otherwise, I invite you to provide a practical example of the broader scope, especially the part about "context-independent transformations" that would be different to what Haskell provides you without that separate notion.

> and negative (space leaks, reasoning difficulty about resource usage).

which is mostly FUD spread by internet crowd who don't know the basics of call-by-need semantics, such as the places you don't bind your intermediate evaluations at, and what language constructs implicitly force evaluations for you.

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iLemming 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> you can fuse any lawful composition of functions

each of those requires manually written rewrite rules or specific library support. It's not a universal property that falls out of laziness - it's careful engineering per data type. Transducers work over any reducing function by construction, not by optimization rules that may or may not fire.

> it's the same problem

It is not. Take a transducer like `(comp (filter odd?) (map inc) (take 5))`. You can apply this to a vector, a lazy seq, a core.async channel, or a custom step function you wrote five minutes ago. The transformation is defined once, independent of source and destination. In Haskell, fusing over a list is one thing. Applying that same composed transformation to a conduit, a streaming pipeline, an io-streams source, and a pure fold requires different code or different typeclass machinery for each. You can absolutely build this abstraction in Haskell (the foldl library gets close), but it's not free - it's a library with design choices, just like transducers are.

You're third claim is basically the "skill issue" defense. Two Haskell Simons - Marlow, and Jones, and also Edward Kmett have all written and spoken about the difficulty of reasoning about space behavior in lazy Haskell. If the people who build the compiler and its core libraries acknowledge it as a real trade-off, dismissing it as FUD from people who "don't know the basics" is not an argument. It's gatekeeping.

Come on, how can you fail to see the difference between: "Haskell can express similar things" with "Haskell gives you this for free"?

	▲	instig007 30 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Why do you eliminate a library-based solution from the equation if it can actually prove the point that there's no difference in intent as long as my runtime is already lazy by default? > It is not. Take a transducer like `(comp (filter odd?) (map inc) (take 5))`. You can apply this to a vector, a lazy seq, a core.async channel, or a custom step function you wrote five minutes ago. In Haskell, fusing over a list is one thing. Applying that same composed transformation to a conduit, a streaming pipeline, an io-streams source, and a pure fold requires different code or different typeclass machinery for each. You can do that only because Clojure doesn't care whether the underlying iterable is to be processed by a side-effectful evaluation. That doesn't negate the fact that the underlying evaluation has a useless notion of "transducer". I said "fuse" in my previous comment to demonstrate that further comptime optimisations are possible that eliminate some transient steps altogether. If you don't need that you can just rely on generic lazy composition of functions that you define once over type classes' constraints. `IsList` + `OverloadedLists` already exist. Had Haskell had a single type class for all iterable implicitly side-effectful data, you would have got the same singly-written algorithm without a single notion of a transducer. Let that sink in: it's not the transducer that's useful, it the differentiation between pure and side-effectful evaluations that allow your compiler to perform even better optimisations with out-of-order evaluations of pure stuff, as well as eliminating parts of inner steps within the composed step function, as opposed to focusing just on the reducing step-function during the composition. It's not a useful abstraction to have if you care about better precision and advanced optimisations coming from the ability to distinguish pure stuff from non-pure stuff. Haskell aside, if your goal is to just compose reusable algorithms, a call-by-need runtime + currying + pointfree notation get you covered, you don't need a notion of transducers that exist on their own (outside of the notion of foldable interfaces) to be able to claim exactly the same benefits. > Two Haskell Simons - Marlow, and Jones, and also Edward Kmett have all written and spoken about the difficulty of reasoning about space behavior in lazy Haskell. There's a difference between what the people said in the past, and the things the crowd claims the people meant about laziness and space leaks. We can go over individual statements and see if they hold the same "negative" meaning that you say is there.