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Leaving Microsoft

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Re: Leaving Microsoft

#41

Post by chriseidhof »

creatio wrote: post #17
smenyp wrote: post #4

FYI, Simon Marlow is incredibly big in the Haskell community and is the leading expert in Multi core parallelism via STMs in Haskell. Some of the work he has done for the GHC compiler is frankly fantastic. This is incredibly big news in the Haskell world. The FP community is starting to break boundaries with the industry in the last 5 years with Clojure (and Scala's functional support). Currently, FB seems to use has…

Did not expect that many companies from the Netherlands using Haskell.

Yeah, Utrecht University has some of the world's leading Haskell researchers, I think it is taught in Groningen as well. In Nijmegen they teach Clean, which is very similar to Haskell.

Re: Leaving Microsoft

#43

Post by gizmo686 »

eta_carinae wrote: post #40
smenyp wrote: post #4

FYI, Simon Marlow is incredibly big in the Haskell community and is the leading expert in Multi core parallelism via STMs in Haskell. Some of the work he has done for the GHC compiler is frankly fantastic. This is incredibly big news in the Haskell world. The FP community is starting to break boundaries with the industry in the last 5 years with Clojure (and Scala's functional support). Currently, FB seems to use has…

> This is incredibly big news in the Haskell world. I'm puzzled why you think this is good news for Haskell. The lead developer and architect of GHC and authority in parallel Haskell is announcing that he's taking a position that won't allow him to spend much time working on GHC, and he might even stop using Haskell completely. It's great news for Simon but terrible news for Haskell.

Big /= Good

Re: Leaving Microsoft

#44

Post by eta_carinae »

smenyp wrote: post #4

FYI, Simon Marlow is incredibly big in the Haskell community and is the leading expert in Multi core parallelism via STMs in Haskell. Some of the work he has done for the GHC compiler is frankly fantastic. This is incredibly big news in the Haskell world. The FP community is starting to break boundaries with the industry in the last 5 years with Clojure (and Scala's functional support). Currently, FB seems to use has…

> The FP community is starting to break boundaries with the industry in the last 5 years with Clojure (and Scala's functional support).

There is very little evidence of that. Do a search for Scala, Clojure or Haskell on the main indicator web sites (job boards, StackOverflow, TIOBE, indeed.com, etc...) and you'll find they are as insignificant today as they were five years ago compared to the mainstream languages.

Re: Leaving Microsoft

#45

Post by mogrim »

46Bit wrote: post #35
brcrth wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very enlightening. I always thought that the "financial world" were locked into Fortran/COBOL.

The financial world is a big place. There's everything from backend systems at banks to stock exchanges, trading houses, stockbrokers, all with different requirements. I think perhaps the most ancient systems are the backend money ones at banks since there's not much money in scraping speed out of them, but I'd love to hear from someone in the field?

Certainly the enterprise stuff at Spanish banks is run on Cobol, and there's still a fair amount of active Cobol development going on. (By enterprise I mean the bread and butter stuff, accounts etc.)

No idea about the trading / derivatives / whatnot, though.

Re: Leaving Microsoft

#46

Post by Someone »

mtrimpe wrote: post #22
creatio wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did not expect that many companies from the Netherlands using Haskell.

Probably because many university students are taught Clean (the 'other' purely functional lazy programming language) [1] which is developed in the Netherlands. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_(programming_language)

I would not bet on that. Utrecht (http://www.cs.uu.nl/wiki/UHC) is in the Netherlands, too. I also expect/guess that it has more CS students than Nijmegen

Re: Leaving Microsoft

#47

Post by seanmcdirmid »

brcrth wrote: post #31
elemeno wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And F# in the financial world, along with Scala. Other Functional languages are being used more as well, but since a huge amount of financial software sits on either a .Net or a Java stack, using FP languages which can easily interop with the rest of your libraries makes life a lot easier.

Very enlightening. I always thought that the "financial world" were locked into Fortran/COBOL.

Hardly. They used to be in love with Smalltalk and even Objective C, even before it was cool with Apple and iOS. Also, lots of LISP. The financial world is incredibly hungry for talent and whatever technology can give them an edge over the competition.

Re: Leaving Microsoft

#48

Post by jeremyjh »

koide wrote: post #27
jeremyjh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. The type inference is a beautiful thing. I had started a project in Scala and I'm finding it hard to stay interested when Haskell is so much more interesting to me. But Scala is a LOT more practical for my project. :(

Care to elaborate a bit on that? Why is Haskell much more interesting?

I just meant it is more interesting to me right now. Scala is really interesting too, but I've been working with it longer. So its just relative to my current interests. I like being challenged to take a purely functional approach to problem solving.

One thing I like better about Haskell which is not time-bound to my own journey is that the language is so much cleaner and more concise. In functional programming it is idiomatic to compose lots of small functions that may be only a single (short) expression each. In Scala this may mean 20-40% of the characters in a line are simply type specifications for your function arguments. I find that oppressive.

Re: Leaving Microsoft

#49

Post by exfalso »

jheriko wrote: post #25
jeremyjh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. The type inference is a beautiful thing. I had started a project in Scala and I'm finding it hard to stay interested when Haskell is so much more interesting to me. But Scala is a LOT more practical for my project. :(

i dunno i've seen type inference create horrible to debug situations - although mainly where it has been shoehorned into to C++11 and used with templates and auto to create code that fails silently doing nothing when a parameter has the wrong type

C++ "type inference" has nothing to do with actual type inference. Types in functional programming languages have a proper academic mathematical foundation, specifically in formal logic. This is in sharp contrast to C++, where it was added as a convenience to avoid specifying certain template parameters. And with so many C++ "features", this one adds yet more ambiguity to the language.

Re: Leaving Microsoft

#50

Post by apl »

eta_carinae wrote: post #44
smenyp wrote: post #4

FYI, Simon Marlow is incredibly big in the Haskell community and is the leading expert in Multi core parallelism via STMs in Haskell. Some of the work he has done for the GHC compiler is frankly fantastic. This is incredibly big news in the Haskell world. The FP community is starting to break boundaries with the industry in the last 5 years with Clojure (and Scala's functional support). Currently, FB seems to use has…

> The FP community is starting to break boundaries with the industry in the last 5 years with Clojure (and Scala's functional support). There is very little evidence of that. Do a search for Scala, Clojure or Haskell on the main indicator web sites (job boards, StackOverflow, TIOBE, indeed.com, etc...) and you'll find they are as insignificant today as they were five years ago compared to the mainstream languages.

While this comes up every single time somebody talks about functional programming making inroads, I still consider it a fairly unhelpful indicator. First, nobody's arguing that big companies are suddenly doing the bulk of their development in these languages. It's about using them at all. Second, job postings may be lagging and distorted in their own way (e.g., junior positions are much more likely to be publicly advertised, and so on).

The less said about TIOBE, the better.

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