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How to Sell Excellence

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Re: How to Sell Excellence

#31

Post by pakled_engineer »

ryandvm wrote: post #4

At the risk of sounding inflammatory... I would be willing to believe that purely functional languages are the "one true way" if there were even the slightest bit of empirical evidence to support it. But where are all the successful large scale projects built with Haskell (or Clojure or whatever)? The biggest FP project I was aware of was Twitter using Scala and they ended up completely backing away from it. Yikes. T…

Lisp, Haskell and other FP are currently killing it in the quiet world of DSLs, especially Mining, Oil & Gas industries which need to parse petaflops of seismic data and reservoir simulations, need rapid prototyping, need formally verified drilling platform components that field engineers can interact with easily, and HPC algorithms for financial trading.

As for Hacker News UX I wish every site was this simple instead of popups everywhere to get me to download their phone app, piles of slow loading fonts, trackers, generic stock images of business suits pointing at a screen, information buried underneath annoying popup FAQ screens, ect.

Re: How to Sell Excellence

#32

Post by mbesto »

ryandvm wrote: post #4

At the risk of sounding inflammatory... I would be willing to believe that purely functional languages are the "one true way" if there were even the slightest bit of empirical evidence to support it. But where are all the successful large scale projects built with Haskell (or Clojure or whatever)? The biggest FP project I was aware of was Twitter using Scala and they ended up completely backing away from it. Yikes. T…

> Java, Python, Ruby, or JavaScript

You mean .NET, PHP, and Java?[0]

[0] - http://trends.builtwith.com/framework

ps - For the record, I'm a rails/js guy

Re: How to Sell Excellence

#33

Post by whateveracct »

dustingetz wrote: post #21
ryandvm wrote: post #4

At the risk of sounding inflammatory... I would be willing to believe that purely functional languages are the "one true way" if there were even the slightest bit of empirical evidence to support it. But where are all the successful large scale projects built with Haskell (or Clojure or whatever)? The biggest FP project I was aware of was Twitter using Scala and they ended up completely backing away from it. Yikes. T…

> Twitter using Scala and they ended up completely backing away from it. Yikes. What are you talking about, I just searched and found zero supporting sources

I've seen people say this but never any real source. Maybe they're mixing up Twitter and Linkedin?

Re: How to Sell Excellence

#34

Post by whateveracct »

coolsunglasses wrote: post #26
ryandvm wrote: post #4

At the risk of sounding inflammatory... I would be willing to believe that purely functional languages are the "one true way" if there were even the slightest bit of empirical evidence to support it. But where are all the successful large scale projects built with Haskell (or Clojure or whatever)? The biggest FP project I was aware of was Twitter using Scala and they ended up completely backing away from it. Yikes. T…

Scala isn't a good language for FP at all. http://www.quora.com/Reviews-of-Functional-Programming-in-Sc...

Sure maybe it's not good for FP if you're Edward Kmett.

> The reason, I'm hesitant to give it a fifth star is ultimately that I don't believe that Scala is a good language in which to actually do functional programming.

Literally the only other mainstream language that he would be able to say is capable of "fp" better than Scala would be Haskell.

Re: How to Sell Excellence

#35

Post by tel »

whateveracct wrote: post #34
coolsunglasses wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scala isn't a good language for FP at all. http://www.quora.com/Reviews-of-Functional-Programming-in-Sc...

Sure maybe it's not good for FP if you're Edward Kmett. > The reason, I'm hesitant to give it a fifth star is ultimately that I don't believe that Scala is a good language in which to actually do functional programming. Literally the only other mainstream language that he would be able to say is capable of "fp" better than Scala would be Haskell.

OCaml, if that passes your "mainstream" test.

Re: How to Sell Excellence

#36

Post by pestaa »

BrandonY wrote: post #19

Reading the "How to Sell to Business" section convinced me as an engineer that I should not focus on Haskell. If Haskell programmers are a better deal for businesses because better programmers can be hired for less money, I should logically choose to be a Java programmer for the same reason.

The Java expert will be hired to maintain a million LOC legacy shitstorm, whereas in Haskell you'd have at least a few engineering guarantees you won't get a headache on your first day.

Re: How to Sell Excellence

#37

Post by dasil003 »

BrandonY wrote: post #19

Reading the "How to Sell to Business" section convinced me as an engineer that I should not focus on Haskell. If Haskell programmers are a better deal for businesses because better programmers can be hired for less money, I should logically choose to be a Java programmer for the same reason.

The paradox is that if you are focused on how to make the most money to the point that you are choosing your programming language based on estimated market value, you are likely not the caliber of developer that the top-tier tech companies are looking for. In other words, you can probably make $150k under an insufferable pointy-hair at any Fortune 500 company, but you won't get to work on cool stuff at Google or Facebook for $250k.

Re: How to Sell Excellence

#38

Post by kevinnk »

pakled_engineer wrote: post #31
ryandvm wrote: post #4

At the risk of sounding inflammatory... I would be willing to believe that purely functional languages are the "one true way" if there were even the slightest bit of empirical evidence to support it. But where are all the successful large scale projects built with Haskell (or Clojure or whatever)? The biggest FP project I was aware of was Twitter using Scala and they ended up completely backing away from it. Yikes. T…

Lisp, Haskell and other FP are currently killing it in the quiet world of DSLs, especially Mining, Oil & Gas industries which need to parse petaflops of seismic data and reservoir simulations, need rapid prototyping, need formally verified drilling platform components that field engineers can interact with easily, and HPC algorithms for financial trading. As for Hacker News UX I wish every site was this simple instea…

Do you have a link for the Oil & Gas DSL? A search for "Haskell oil gas dsl" didn't turn up much.

Re: How to Sell Excellence

#39

Post by deeviant »

amazing_jose wrote: post #18

I loved Haskell, seriously! The year was 1997 and my uni professor was contributing to Hugs (do you remember it?). But, while I was working my way through Monads and stuff other people were running circles around me in C or C++. The basics were "simple" (even for basic C++) and they concentrated in getting things done. Years later I launched my first start-up idea on Common Lisp. In both situation I learnt two hard t…

I really could not have said it better. Programmers seem much more likely to feel the need to prove they are smarter than their peers than the average population and functional languages seem to be a very popular I'm-smarter-than-you badge to bandy about.

I think the penetration of functional programming speaks for itself. If a tool is clearly superior, you'd expect it to do great things, and to do it often. I hear tons of excuses but not one that has made any sense.

To be clear, I'm not say functional languages are worthless, I am succinctly saying that they are not measurably more productive than the usual suspects and I say this after having a rather pleasant experience with erlang working on a rather huge ejabberd plugin.

Re: How to Sell Excellence

#40

Post by solomatov »

dragonwriter wrote: post #25
solomatov wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Google's Ganeti? Microsoft's Bond? Only 2 known products for 20+ years of being widely known and available is unimpressive.

Those aren't the only two known projects, those are just two examples of open source projects that are, in addition, used in key infrastructure by the major solutions provider that is the original source of the project, and so widely, if indirectly, used. More Haskell use in production: https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell_in_industry

Compare this list to Java/C#/C++ used in the industry. Or even to Scala/Clojure/Erlang used in industry. There will be several orders of magnitude difference.
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