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The New Haskell.org

haskell.org

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Re: The New Haskell.org

#32
I really like the new design. The old site was certainly showing its age--very dense and hard to navigate. Never mind the lovely 1990s motif. This is far more welcoming and user-friendly, especially to those who might be curious about Haskell.

It's exciting to witness Haskell gain traction within industry. Facebook announced last week that its building an entirely new Haskell team to focus on distributed systems, data mining, and machine learning. They're also hiring for a second team to support Haxl [1].

For those eager to use Haskell in the workplace, I imagine the new design should make it easier to formulate a compelling business case. Being able to point your project manager and/or colleagues to a website that clearly explains what Haskell is--and what sets it apart--is a big plus.

The source code for the site can be found on GitHub [2]. Awesome work by Chris Done, who kicked this off last year; see his blog post about the motivation for the new site [3].

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/2useoq/haskell_oppo...

[2] https://github.com/haskell-infra/hl

[3] http://chrisdone.com/posts/haskell-lang

Re: The New Haskell.org

#33

This new, awesome site is using the framework Yesod[0], which is kinda like the Rails of the Haskell world, only it can do rad stuff like prevent XSS and 404s at compile time . Yes, you read that right. [0] http://www.yesodweb.com/

Tell me more about preventing 404 at compile time. I call http://www.yesodweb.com/bullshit

Presumably the idea is that you can prevent your site having broken internal links by constructing links with data types and checking the links when creating them at compile time. You could actually do something similar in most languages, even dynamic ones, so I don't see what is specific to haskell about it, e.g. rails has link_to and friends which require you to have a route set up in order to link to it (though not compile time). Golang has similar protection for XSS and reverse routes on routers if you require it so again not specific to Haskell.

Clearly you won't be able to prevent (nor would you want to) links like yours above from being a 404, so perhaps no more internal 404s would be more accurate.

Re: The New Haskell.org

#34
post #8

Out of curiosity: Who has written Haskell & deployed to production in the last 24h and if yes for what kind of app?

I know Amsterdam startup http://www.silk.co has their entire backend written in Haskell. I'm not sure they deploy in weekends though. Their CEO Salar told me that that, among other things, it gives them a hiring edge. People move to Amsterdam from all kinds of places just so they can write Haskell professionally.

No we usually don't deploy in weekends. Only if we break stuff just before the weekend. :)

Re: The New Haskell.org

#35
This redesign appears to take the position: the first page on haskell.org is for people who are brand new to the language, not for people who are already learning the language or currently use the language. I don't like that choice. I think the page should be trying to be the most useful for users of the language with a link to an About or Getting Started page that is geared toward new users. To me, a user of the language visits the site dozens or hundreds of times over the course of a career, while the average brand new user only visits it (I'm guessing here) 1.1 times. But I can appreciate the difference of opinion and priorities and from the creator's perspective I think the page does an ok job.

It makes me wonder though, what if news.ycombinator.com took that position. What if it were a page describing what Hacker News is, how posting and commenting and voting works, and how long the community had been around, etc. And then there were a link in a menu that said "Submissions" that took you to the actual content.

For someone currently learning the language (past the first 5 minutes) or that uses the language regularly, the only useful things on this front page are the four links along the top.

As for improvements, I think some sections (e.g. community banner) should be removed. I think the videos should, given the focus on brand new users, probably be removed too. The community banner is, I believe, only there to facilitate displaying the titles when people click on the videos. I haven't watched any of the videos, but from their titles I am skeptical that they should be watched before the next section (Features) is read, so they should, at a minimum, be moved further down the page. I don't like the alternating dark/light sections, so moving them further down would give you a more traditional dark header, light content, dark footer look.

I assume the videos are not going to change regularly, because they appear to all be from a single Vimeo account that has more recent videos than those that are displayed. If the videos are kept, I think the titles should be visible without clicking on the video, because I thought (which means some others will think) that clicking on the video would start playing it. Hovering one by one to see the title is not a good solution.

Congrats to the people who built and deployed this, I'm sure it took a long time to get it live (since I remember seeing this page hosted elsewhere many months ago).

Re: The New Haskell.org

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know Amsterdam startup http://www.silk.co has their entire backend written in Haskell. I'm not sure they deploy in weekends though. Their CEO Salar told me that that, among other things, it gives them a hiring edge. People move to Amsterdam from all kinds of places just so they can write Haskell professionally.

No we usually don't deploy in weekends. Only if we break stuff just before the weekend. :)

Indeed! So you didn't deploy Haskell in the last 24h so you don't count :-)

Re: The New Haskell.org

#37

I'm new to Haskell, and I like this page. So, wanting to get a feel for it, I tried typing the sieve example from the top of the page into the "Type Haskell expressions in here." box right beneath it. First, I got :1:8: parse error on input `=' Hm so apparently definitions aren't expressions? Or something? I decided to remove the `primes = ` part, which made my browser really slow and had no result. I'm assuming it w…

Two problems: 1. multi-line expressions aren't supported by the REPL. 2. You will need to use `let x = ..` syntax in the REPL (This is because the REPL are just so called IO-actions and the `let` syntax defines variables within its lexical scope) You could try this: > let sieve (p:xs) = p : sieve [x | x let primes = sieve [2..] > primes !! 3 > primes !! 4 Nice part abou this code is eventhough you express calculating…

This online REPL does not support `let` either.

`let x = 4` is not an expression there.

Re: The New Haskell.org

#38

This new, awesome site is using the framework Yesod[0], which is kinda like the Rails of the Haskell world, only it can do rad stuff like prevent XSS and 404s at compile time . Yes, you read that right. [0] http://www.yesodweb.com/

You know what is REALLY cool? Almost all haskell web frameworks use the Web Application Interface[0]. Which is a unified interface for haskell web applications. This means you can mount web applications written in OTHER frameworks under your routes and vica versa. [0] http://www.stackage.org/package/wai

Yeah, wsgi was also cool when it appeared for Python, back in 2003.

Re: The New Haskell.org

#39
post #8

Out of curiosity: Who has written Haskell & deployed to production in the last 24h and if yes for what kind of app?

I know Amsterdam startup http://www.silk.co has their entire backend written in Haskell. I'm not sure they deploy in weekends though. Their CEO Salar told me that that, among other things, it gives them a hiring edge. People move to Amsterdam from all kinds of places just so they can write Haskell professionally.

As someone who moved to Amsterdam to write Haskell (and JavaScript) for Silk, I can confirm that the combination of a beautiful bike-friendly European city, a Haskell backend, and exceedingly cool co-workers makes for a very pleasant working environment.

I'm off on other adventures now, but I have no skepticism about deploying Haskell in production. Yeah, it's still a bit obscure, but if you're looking for smart and eager programmers, Haskell is good bait.

Re: The New Haskell.org

#40

I'm new to Haskell, and I like this page. So, wanting to get a feel for it, I tried typing the sieve example from the top of the page into the "Type Haskell expressions in here." box right beneath it. First, I got :1:8: parse error on input `=' Hm so apparently definitions aren't expressions? Or something? I decided to remove the `primes = ` part, which made my browser really slow and had no result. I'm assuming it w…

The biggest problem isn't what others have said. The biggest problem is that the try box doesn't let you define your own functions or variables.

Therefore, even if you were an old hand at GHC and GHCi and so on, you'd still be unable to run the code it shows at the top of the page.

This is probably bad website design. Especially since the website still lets randoms burn themselves by entering non-terminating code that makes their browsers slow.

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