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Fighting spam with Haskell

code.facebook.com

61–70 of 98 posts

Re: Fighting spam with Haskell

#61
post #25
post #16

Damn you FaceBook. I dislike the underlying premise, the adverts, and (especially) the "real names" policy. But... between great bits of Open Source like React, cool infrastructure projects like this, and a technical culture which seems a whole lot more open than many other big companies, it's getting kind-of hard to go on hating. Walk back a bit from the obsession with open plan offices, and I might just cave...

Their commitment to open source is truly amazing - I am currently in the process of interviewing with them, and am increasingly in awe of the company. Surprisingly, their massive open office is the quietest office I have been in. It is a really nice workplace.

This. From my experience at Facebook and Google, FB's open space is way more quiet than cubicles at Google. People in the other cubicle feel like the others don't hear them (they do).

Re: Fighting spam with Haskell

#62
post #18
post #6

How does the hot-swapping work? The only way I had seen of making this happen is what xmonad does. I'm assuming this is radically different from that.

I was wondering that myself. Maybe they will release code examples on how that works. I'm only slightly familiar with the Haskell ecosystem but I have also wondered if it has a plugin like system (e.g. OSGI for Java).

I've had some mild success with https://hackage.haskell.org/package/dynamic-loader (which is basically just a Haskell wrapper around the C-functions in the RTS), but compared to writing normal Haskell, this is playing with fire as you loose all type-checking guarantees.

Re: Fighting spam with Haskell

#63

This is impressive, and in line with Haskell's philosophy to "avoid success at all costs". As a mere mortal programmer, who knows a little Haskell, my takeaway is that if you want to run Haskell in at web scale for a a large userbase, you need the language's primarily compiler author to help build the application and to modify the Haskell compiler to make it performant. And you also need your team led by a 20-year-ve…

This is an incredibly stupid takeaway. Facebook can hire the best software engineers and computer scientists in the world, so of course they hire such people and these people build stuff at Facebook.

That doesn't mean other people can't use Haskell to build web applications.

Re: Fighting spam with Haskell

#64

This is impressive, and in line with Haskell's philosophy to "avoid success at all costs". As a mere mortal programmer, who knows a little Haskell, my takeaway is that if you want to run Haskell in at web scale for a a large userbase, you need the language's primarily compiler author to help build the application and to modify the Haskell compiler to make it performant. And you also need your team led by a 20-year-ve…

[deleted]

Re: Fighting spam with Haskell

#65

I learned a few things from this post outside the usual "technical" explanations: 1. They have CORE Haskell contributors on their payroll to deliver this type of project (what this mean is that no... Haskell isn't any better than other language, it's just that they have people who know Haskell very very deep to the compiler level...) 2. In-house custom language eventually does not scale (the EOL is much much much sho…

What you should ask yourself then is, why did they hire core Haskell contributors?

Let's see. because they can afford to? Also perhaps because they are Facebook, not your average company?

Who should they hire instead? Given the opportunity and the means, wouldn't you hire someone of that caliber for your preferred language/environment?

Re: Fighting spam with Haskell

#66
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But... between great bits of Open Source like React, cool infrastructure projects like this, and a technical culture which seems a whole lot more open than many other big companies, it's getting kind-of hard to go on hating. Walk back a bit from the obsession with open plan offices, and I might just cave... Wholeheartedly agree with you comment, Facebook's engineering blog is truly humbling. There is not a day wher…

Facebook could easily promote more privacy and anonymity while remaining profitable . It could have been a non-profit and aimed to make money without compromising privacy. It wouldn't be as profitable but that's a different story.

I would be genuinely interested in knowing how they could have scaled organizationally without money from investors who would have pushed them to make a profit.
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