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Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]

dev.stephendiehl.com

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Re: Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]

#131

Post by svara »

nh2 wrote: post #37
quickthrower2 wrote: post #9

I think the focus on Haskell is missing the mark a bit. Haskell is about programming language researchers and enthusiasts having a excellent example language to try out ideas. Over the years it has turned into a production ready platform. As the PDF shows there are many languages spun off Haskell and it doesn't even mention them all. Then there are language features in C# and Java, Typescript etc. that are coming acr…

Counter point on "investment": I was in a Haskell team at Google, and have trained groups at various companies professionally. From that experience, for a normal developer with working experience in Java, Python, or C++: * It takes 2-3 weeks of full-time onboarding (half with a coach, half self-study) to work on a typical industrial Haskell project. * It takes around 3 months of full-time participation in such a proj…

Parent comment said 100 hours to be productive, 1000 to be reasonable, so your experience (2-3 weeks, 3 months) is actually pretty close to that.

Re: Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]

#132

Post by JoelMcCracken »

goto11 wrote: post #97
JoelMcCracken wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haskell does have an issue of people using it being more interested in doing clever things and researching topics than building cool applications. Haskell jobs do exist, I have one of them. The big problem is that there are more people who want to do those jobs than there are jobs, so they seem very scarce. But anyway there are also a number of investment banks I have heard that use Haskell as their “secret weapon” a…

> use Haskell as their “secret weapon” and do not advertise it, in fact those who could speak to details are all under NDA. I remember hearing this said about Perl back in the day! Language X is so awesome businesses use it in secret because they don't want their competitors to discover the secret to their success. Not saying it couldn't happen, but you can say it about any language and it can't really be disproven.

Right. It’s frustrating. I’m not under NDA with them but I don’t want to get anyone into trouble, but even if I did name names I don’t think anyone would back it up.

This is why we need more publicity-visible Haskell success stories.

Re: Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]

#133

Post by chrisseaton »

atombender wrote: post #83
chrisseaton wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stream API would be my first thought but I am not as familiar with Java. Can you name any design characteristics in Java's stream API that came from Haskell, rather than were already common in many languages when Haskell itself was designed? I can't.

Java's "stream fusion" is inspired by the same technique that was originally implemented, I believe, in Haskell [1]. [1] http://fun.cs.tufts.edu/stream-fusion.pdf

But Java doesn't do stream fusion as you're describing.

It does conventional inlining and combining loop bodies, which can in some trivial cases achieve the same effect, but these are techniques you'd find in any compiler or even an 80s text book - they didn't come from Haskell.

Here's the limitation of Java's 'fusion' - you'll notice there's no pass to do this in Hotspot - it just happens due to the inlining and GCM passes.

https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/883a4f65b9b1533c8a51d156...

And here's a paper on trying to add actual Fusion to Java, which they wouldn't be doing if Java had it already.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3355378.3355386?download=...

Re: Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]

#134

Post by mrkeen »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #17

When will Haskell get a different spokesperson? Stephen isn’t effective in this role. These posts have jumped the shark to the point when I see a big Haskell post on HN and see stephendiehl.com it’s just time to tune out. For Haskell to succeed, it has to move away from rigid commitment to various pure functional paradigms and move to eager execution by default. But Stephen does not help this, just preferring to inst…

> For Haskell to succeed, it has to move away from rigid commitment to various pure functional paradigms and move to eager execution by default.

How far do you want to take the eager execution thing?

Should we get rid of boolean short-circuiting?

Should if-statements evaluate both the true and false paths before choosing one?

Should compilers no longer remove dead code?

Re: Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]

#135

Post by mrkeen »

jbritton wrote: post #45

I tried twice to get started with Haskell. I understand the language well enough, but the standard prelude gave me problems. I forget the details, but the first attempt involved reading ASCII strings from file. I had some issue with the standard string type and after a bunch of searching and trying other things, nothing worked. The second time I tried to use sockets. After a few days, I discovered sockets were both b…

> I had some issue with the standard string type and after a bunch of searching and trying other things, nothing worked

Post some code!

Re: Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]

#136

Post by foolmeonce »

svara wrote: post #131
nh2 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter point on "investment": I was in a Haskell team at Google, and have trained groups at various companies professionally. From that experience, for a normal developer with working experience in Java, Python, or C++: * It takes 2-3 weeks of full-time onboarding (half with a coach, half self-study) to work on a typical industrial Haskell project. * It takes around 3 months of full-time participation in such a proj…

Parent comment said 100 hours to be productive, 1000 to be reasonable, so your experience (2-3 weeks, 3 months) is actually pretty close to that.

True, but then the multiple for C# is either nonsense or a false comparison of going between near identical languages or of writing code of very different quality and utility.

There are plenty of cases where a broken notebook is about as good as a spreadsheet, and languages suited/typical to that use have a psychological victory that results in apples to oranges comparisons.

Re: Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]

#137

Post by h91wka »

mratsim wrote: post #129
jeffdavis wrote: post #82

As a database person, I think if more haskell people took an interest in database languages, the world would be a better place.

They surely did, and got the very unique Software Transactional Memory based multithreading.

I think Erlang's mnesia was the earliest implementation of STM.

Re: Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]

#138

Post by [deleted] »

nh2 wrote: post #37
quickthrower2 wrote: post #9

I think the focus on Haskell is missing the mark a bit. Haskell is about programming language researchers and enthusiasts having a excellent example language to try out ideas. Over the years it has turned into a production ready platform. As the PDF shows there are many languages spun off Haskell and it doesn't even mention them all. Then there are language features in C# and Java, Typescript etc. that are coming acr…

Counter point on "investment": I was in a Haskell team at Google, and have trained groups at various companies professionally. From that experience, for a normal developer with working experience in Java, Python, or C++: * It takes 2-3 weeks of full-time onboarding (half with a coach, half self-study) to work on a typical industrial Haskell project. * It takes around 3 months of full-time participation in such a proj…

[deleted]

Re: Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]

#139

Post by davedx »

cies wrote: post #15
quickthrower2 wrote: post #9

I think the focus on Haskell is missing the mark a bit. Haskell is about programming language researchers and enthusiasts having a excellent example language to try out ideas. Over the years it has turned into a production ready platform. As the PDF shows there are many languages spun off Haskell and it doesn't even mention them all. Then there are language features in C# and Java, Typescript etc. that are coming acr…

> Instead of Haskell we should be thinking of programming language research and how to get the best ideas into our mainstream languages. I see a lot of this happening in Kotlin and Rust (not too mainstream, but clearly more mainstream than Haskell). Also FB putting it weight behind Reason/OCaml clearly shows the movement. To be fair: sdiehl did mention in the preso that copying these concept over to other languages t…

Well nulls are gradually getting pushed away with newer C#. It's definitely something MS and .NET shops are investing in.

Re: Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]

#140

Post by goto11 »

JoelMcCracken wrote: post #132
goto11 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> use Haskell as their “secret weapon” and do not advertise it, in fact those who could speak to details are all under NDA. I remember hearing this said about Perl back in the day! Language X is so awesome businesses use it in secret because they don't want their competitors to discover the secret to their success. Not saying it couldn't happen, but you can say it about any language and it can't really be disproven.

Right. It’s frustrating. I’m not under NDA with them but I don’t want to get anyone into trouble, but even if I did name names I don’t think anyone would back it up. This is why we need more publicity-visible Haskell success stories.

If the "secret weapon"-theory is true, then I guess the companies loudly proclaiming they use Haskell could just be trying to trick their competitors into using it...
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