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Comment by iLemming

> 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).

parent iLemming 6 months ago

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