In Vivid 0.2 (out any day now!) I use type strings pretty pervasively. I'd say that for my needs they were really useful, but the design phase was long (and kinda painful). I can imagine many cases where they're too painful and/or not powerful enough but I'm very happy with what I ended up with.
A-, would type string again.
tom
El Aug 15, 2015, a las 9:35, Silvio Frischknecht
A good headache or a bad headache? If it's hard to learn but ultimately satisfying and useful then I'm all up for it. If it's hard to learn because Haskell doesn't really support it naturally then I'll probably avoid it.
Well that depends on how you look at it. GHC has a fair number of extensions for dealing with type level programming. And there surely is a reason for all of them. And you can get some elegant type level programming. But it's hard to get right. It's is especially hard if you want Haskell to infer your types. It can definitely be worth it. I coded a unit system the day before yesterday. I'm using it in my project now and that was definitely worth it. But I've done stuff like this before and it usually takes a few days for me to wrap my head around things.
Btw. I'm just an enthusiast. I don't do this professionally.
I can tell you the extensions you will probably need and that you should have a look at.
TypeFamilies - often useful (closed type families for defaults) KindSignatures - for working with different kinds such as Symbol TypeOperators - for making typelevel operators
DataKinds - If you want to make your own kinds (probably not needed)
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