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The New Haskell Homepage

new-www.haskell.org

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Re: The New Haskell Homepage

#81

Post by rtfeldman »

Pacabel wrote: post #78
rtfeldman wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes - the practical reason is to focus on the newcomer's experience. Information overload is actively harmful to someone coming to haskell.org to learn about the language from scratch. Omitting content that is primarily valuable to experienced Haskellers is a feature, not a bug.

This sounds like a dangerous trade off to be making. It's reminiscent of what we saw with GNOME 3, or even Windows 8. The experience is made much worse for existing users, in a vain attempt to "simplify" the design to allegedly appeal to new users who may not even really exist in practice. It's obvious now that it didn't work well in those cases, and I don't see why this case would be any different. As an occasional…

This case is different because it's an introductory page rather than a tool intended for heavy daily use, like GNOME or Windows.

Newbies are going to head to haskell.org when they want to learn about the language, and it's sensible for them to be greeted by a pleasant introduction to the language.

As "an occasional Haskell user," you aren't the target audience for the haskell.org landing page. :) If you're visiting on a regular basis, there's no reason your needs couldn't be met by some page other than the landing page.

Re: The New Haskell Homepage

#82

Post by nbouscal »

Pacabel wrote: post #78
rtfeldman wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes - the practical reason is to focus on the newcomer's experience. Information overload is actively harmful to someone coming to haskell.org to learn about the language from scratch. Omitting content that is primarily valuable to experienced Haskellers is a feature, not a bug.

This sounds like a dangerous trade off to be making. It's reminiscent of what we saw with GNOME 3, or even Windows 8. The experience is made much worse for existing users, in a vain attempt to "simplify" the design to allegedly appeal to new users who may not even really exist in practice. It's obvious now that it didn't work well in those cases, and I don't see why this case would be any different. As an occasional…

As an established user, I navigate directly to hackage or the wiki. I don't remember the last time I hit the homepage.

Re: The New Haskell Homepage

#83

Post by cgag »

Pacabel wrote: post #78
rtfeldman wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes - the practical reason is to focus on the newcomer's experience. Information overload is actively harmful to someone coming to haskell.org to learn about the language from scratch. Omitting content that is primarily valuable to experienced Haskellers is a feature, not a bug.

This sounds like a dangerous trade off to be making. It's reminiscent of what we saw with GNOME 3, or even Windows 8. The experience is made much worse for existing users, in a vain attempt to "simplify" the design to allegedly appeal to new users who may not even really exist in practice. It's obvious now that it didn't work well in those cases, and I don't see why this case would be any different. As an occasional…

i'm pretty sure existing users don't go to the official haskell site

Re: The New Haskell Homepage

#84

Post by dcre »

tel wrote: post #62
vamega wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you suggest a simpler example? Finding primes is something that is taught in the first programming class in Indian high schools. I guess I've never thought of it as something hard. I looked at nodejs.org, and their first example is a web server! Python has the Fibonacci as it's second example (the first one show's numeric operations). Ruby does simple string operations on it's home page. While I think that is i…

Well, for one, it's a bad sieve algorithm. I think a neat algorithm to demonstrate laziness and Haskell clarity would be enumerating the Calkin-Wilf rationals. [0] It's quite a bit longer but demonstrates a number of neat ideas. I'll start first with a derivation which demonstrates all of the structure of the algorithm and then go through a series of mechanical transforms so that by the end I have a one-liner and a c…

Wonderful comment, but I have a math degree and Haskell experience. This stuff would be insane to drop on a beginner.

Re: The New Haskell Homepage

#86

Post by chewxy »

I don't quite like this. The old one had front page links to the haskell wiki. This design is really information undense. Also, links to Hoogle and packages would be fantastic in the front page

Re: The New Haskell Homepage

#87

Post by jsmeaton »

daffodil2 wrote: post #68
jsmeaton wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like you're being downvoted, but I have to agree with you, especially given some of the examples right at the top. foldr (:) [] [1,2,3] There is absolutely nothing natural about that line of code unless you happen to already have some background. I executed that in the sandbox and got: [1,2,3]:: Num a => [a] And I still don't know what was achieved.

For a function f and a value x, foldr f x [a,b,c] gets turned into f(a, f(b, f(c, x))) '(:)' is list concatenation, so the result is 1 : (2 : (3 : [])) (Here we are writing list concatenation in infix notation, rather than the customary prefix notation). '[1,2,3]' is shorthand for 1 : (2 : (3: [])) in Haskell.

Thanks, I appreciate the walk through. So it's essentially just copying an array (in this particular example). I'd still argue that the syntax is not natural - since you have to have specific knowledge of the operator and the function.

Re: The New Haskell Homepage

#88

Post by judk »

bignaj wrote: post #80
ufo wrote: post #35

It bugs me a bit that the example code is brute force trial division instead of a true prime sieve. Sure, it highlights lazyness but the algorithm is less efficient. http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~oneill/papers/Sieve-JFP.pdf

If you ever wanted to know what a typical Haskell programmer sounds like, ^^this is it to a T.

No, typical Haskell programmers avoid talking about performance issues, because those highlight how awkward it is to write high- performance code.

Re: The New Haskell Homepage

#89

Post by judk »

Tyr42 wrote: post #36

I feel like the sieve is a poor example, since it's not actually the same algorithm as a sieve, and has a worse running time. It is possible to write a very nice lazy infinite sieve. See O’Neill's "The Genuine Sieve of Eratosthenes" paper for details. http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~oneill/papers/Sieve-JFP.pdf

It fits the tradition established by the quicksort that isn't really a quicksort.

Re: The New Haskell Homepage

#90

Post by judk »

sordina wrote: post #50

I'd either link from the heading, or add some variety to the "View examples" links. Possibly something like: * Show me a world without Null * How does Haskell help me scale? * When does less code give me more? * Take me on a tour of Hackage

This would be a massive improvement.
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