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Leaving Microsoft

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Re: Leaving Microsoft

#31

Post by brcrth »

elemeno wrote: post #23
gordonguthrie wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pedant calling - Erlang is a functional programming language that has been doing very nicely thank you in a lot of big companies (Amazon, Facebook amongst others) for a good while now.

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.

Re: Leaving Microsoft

#32

Post by tensor »

plinkplonk wrote: post #26
jheriko wrote: post #24

i'm assuming this guy has done real world work before? the idea of a compiler/language lead programmer effectively having lived in academia is terrifying on many levels. best of luck to him at any rate. haskell and ghc are a cool language and compiler combo, one i have enjoyed for recreational programming time and time again.

"The idea of a compiler/language lead programmer effectively having lived in academia is terrifying on many levels." The apparent cluelessness level of this statement is so high, I am unable to decide if this is just ignorance or very sophisticated trolling. If the compiler dev working in a university or a research lab while developing the compiler is "terrifying", you should avoid C, C++, and Python, not to mention…

It's tempting to down vote him, but at the same time this is a real sentiment that some people seem to have. Perhaps it should be grouped into the current anti-intellectual trend. Either way, it's a real problem.

Re: Leaving Microsoft

#33

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Leaving Microsoft

#34

Post by _delirium »

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.

That's more true in certain Enterprisey, conservative parts of the financial world, backoffice bank records and that kind of thing. In investment/quant/trading parts there's more experimentation with other languages, both functional languages like F#, and even particularly "weird" languages like K (an APL successor).

Re: Leaving Microsoft

#35

Post by 46Bit »

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.

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?

Re: Leaving Microsoft

#37

Post by gtrak »

jheriko wrote: post #24

i'm assuming this guy has done real world work before? the idea of a compiler/language lead programmer effectively having lived in academia is terrifying on many levels. best of luck to him at any rate. haskell and ghc are a cool language and compiler combo, one i have enjoyed for recreational programming time and time again.

The real world is crappy, and we're depending on these academic types to free us from the drollness of it, because we don't all have time to invent an STM. If I wanted to write CRUD apps all day and say that's real-world, I suppose I could, but I would rather enjoy enlightenment.

Function invocation overhead, you say? Why would I want that?

How about Garbage Collection? It'll never work.

It's their responsibility to create foundational research, and it's ours to filter through it and prove the good bits with fire.

'Practical' is a red-herring, I think. We have no way to predict the future, but we all care about progress.

Re: Leaving Microsoft

#38

Post by [deleted] »

jheriko wrote: post #24

i'm assuming this guy has done real world work before? the idea of a compiler/language lead programmer effectively having lived in academia is terrifying on many levels. best of luck to him at any rate. haskell and ghc are a cool language and compiler combo, one i have enjoyed for recreational programming time and time again.

[deleted]

Re: Leaving Microsoft

#39

Post by djhworld »

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…

Does it actually mean Haskell is going to permeate into Facebook's stack though?

Simon might just be looking for a new challenge, with Haskell as his side hobby.

Re: Leaving Microsoft

#40

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…

> 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.

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