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Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001)

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Re: Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001)

#51

Post by MichaelGG »

pjmlp wrote: post #32
CJefferson wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That day will come, for many of us, when a large AAA game, web browser, or usable OS is written in a FP language. And I realise that is an unfair target, but there is very little user facing FP software. The only one I can think of I have used is xmonad, which is both hard to use and fairly buggy

You mean like Crash Bandicoot, Abuse, Jak and Daxter? Or maybe Genera. Or maybe Remote Agent software used by Nasa Deep Space 1? Or eventually the train control systems running on software from Siscog?

Probably more like when Mozilla ships a browser written in Rust. Even though Rust handles low-level so well, it heavily uses FP concepts.

Meanwhile, this is good news for people creating startups or otherwise being competitive. Having advanced programming languages where your competition is mired down having to churn out 10x more code, is certainly a benefit. Although not every (many?) business really comes down to technical ability.

Re: Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001)

#52

Post by dkersten »

Arwill wrote: post #37
weeksie wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the worst attitude. University is not supposed to be vocational school.

No, the worst is when you get to talk with people fresh out of college, and you can't give them a job, because they are useless. Sober up people.

No, the worst is when you get to talk with people fresh out of college who "know" all the latest industry hype but still can't put basic programs together, lack basic problem solving skill and basic algorithmic thinking.

Sure, teach them some practical get-a-job stuff, but also teach them how to learn, how to solve problems, the different tools (functional, OO, logic, low-level etc) available and make sure they can solve real problems on their own.

Re: Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001)

#53

Post by arjie »

dkersten wrote: post #49
jfaucett wrote: post #8

I don't see why they don't just teach C, x86, and Haskell everywhere. If you know the concepts behind these, you can quickly grok any other programming language. Also I never got the whole hype behind OOP. IMHO its self explanatory, nothing you need an entire course on to be effective and understand OOP programs. Memory layout and management, advanced pointer concepts and monads are a slightly different matter. If I…

and monads I really don't understand why people have such issues with monads. I don't have a haskell background and originally built up most of my functional programming skill in Python (going somewhat against the grain) and I find monads to be a fancy scary term for an extremely simple concept. I think if they were named something friendlier perhaps people's eyes wouldn't immediately glaze over and they could realis…

How about F#'s Computation Expressions? Not exactly the same, I'm told, but they're close, if so.

Re: Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001)

#54

Post by pron »

jfaucett wrote: post #8

I don't see why they don't just teach C, x86, and Haskell everywhere. If you know the concepts behind these, you can quickly grok any other programming language. Also I never got the whole hype behind OOP. IMHO its self explanatory, nothing you need an entire course on to be effective and understand OOP programs. Memory layout and management, advanced pointer concepts and monads are a slightly different matter. If I…

> If you know the concepts behind these, you can quickly grok any other programming language.

"Grokking" a programming languages is just a means to an end, and far from being the most important means (well, for interesting problems, at least). Most (though not all) of important concepts in CS have absolutely nothing to do with the choice of language.

At my university they taught Scheme (SICP) in Intro to Comp Sci, and C -- both in the first year -- and all the rest was just data structures, algorithms, computational complexity, operating systems, numerical algebra, compilation, and electives in vision/graphics/PLs/DSP/whatever. We could do the exercises in whatever language we chose (usually C). In short they taught us just theory and one practical PL (maybe Java, too, for concurrency problems) so that we could actually do the exercises, and boy did we have a lot of good programmers who came out of that school. I owe to my university the realization that the programming language is one of the least important things in CS and software engineering.

Re: Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001)

#55

Post by [deleted] »

hnriot wrote: post #35
jfaucett wrote: post #8

I don't see why they don't just teach C, x86, and Haskell everywhere. If you know the concepts behind these, you can quickly grok any other programming language. Also I never got the whole hype behind OOP. IMHO its self explanatory, nothing you need an entire course on to be effective and understand OOP programs. Memory layout and management, advanced pointer concepts and monads are a slightly different matter. If I…

I'm not sure pointer concepts are very difficult, pointers might confuse people that didn't grow up with assembly language, but they really aren't very hard to understand and they are also less and less relevant. Over the years the abstraction level increases, it's far better to teach people to continue computer science to the next 21st century level, not go over stuff from the 70's again that they will likely never…

[deleted]

Re: Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001)

#56

Post by pjmlp »

alayne wrote: post #45
pjmlp wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like Crash Bandicoot, Abuse, Jak and Daxter? Or maybe Genera. Or maybe Remote Agent software used by Nasa Deep Space 1? Or eventually the train control systems running on software from Siscog?

You can do functional programming in Lisp, but even the wiki page for GOAL says "GOAL encourages an imperative programming style". Not to mention most Lisp data structures being mutable if we're talking purely functional.

I have a problem with modern notions of purely functional.

My first functional programming language was Caml Light, back in 1996. Followed by Prolog and eventually Lisp.

All alongside traditional lambda calculus and logic proofs, with ocasional references to a programming language called Mirada.

So for me, Lisp is functional programming and I don't buy into this modern notion that only Haskell is the poster child of FP.

Re: Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001)

#57

Post by sbov »

tormeh wrote: post #36

There's a link on the page to this essay by Dijkstra: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1012... It's overall badly (at least foggily) written, but I find this quote really on point: >The moral of the story is clear: real programmers don't reason about their programs, for reasoning isn't macho. They rather get their substitute for intellectual satisfaction from not quite understanding what they a…

You could actually argue the opposite.

People who can use C++ need to reason about their programs because otherwise they're going to shoot their foot off. You can be irresponsible in a language like python and get away with it because you're not going to cause the issues you would in C++.

I think that, to some extent, this is true. If you don't know what you're doing I find it's easier to code yourself into a corner in C++ than something like python.

(Disclaimer: I haven't used C++ in a decade)

Re: Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001)

#58

Post by Someone »

CJefferson wrote: post #15
mathetic wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am looking forward to the day the notion that functional languages are not suitable for developing software will die. It is not only that functional languages are more succinct, easier to reason about and are more readable, they also often come with significantly better type systems. Some have type systems sophisticated enough to specify nearly all the legal states and guarantee these are the only states the progra…

That day will come, for many of us, when a large AAA game, web browser, or usable OS is written in a FP language. And I realise that is an unfair target, but there is very little user facing FP software. The only one I can think of I have used is xmonad, which is both hard to use and fairly buggy

Not there at all (slower than the Pascal equivalent, limited to fairly simple games, and uses some C), but nevertheless interesting is http://cleangl.sourceforge.net/thesis/CGL.pdf, which describes a game library in Concurrent Clean.

(reading http://clean.cs.ru.nl and looking at the archives of the mailing list may give the impression the project died at the end of 2011, but http://clean.cs.ru.nl/Download_Clean has binaries from November 2014)

Re: Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001)

#59

Post by nbouscal »

dkersten wrote: post #49
jfaucett wrote: post #8

I don't see why they don't just teach C, x86, and Haskell everywhere. If you know the concepts behind these, you can quickly grok any other programming language. Also I never got the whole hype behind OOP. IMHO its self explanatory, nothing you need an entire course on to be effective and understand OOP programs. Memory layout and management, advanced pointer concepts and monads are a slightly different matter. If I…

and monads I really don't understand why people have such issues with monads. I don't have a haskell background and originally built up most of my functional programming skill in Python (going somewhat against the grain) and I find monads to be a fancy scary term for an extremely simple concept. I think if they were named something friendlier perhaps people's eyes wouldn't immediately glaze over and they could realis…

I really don't understand why people think monad is a "fancy scary term". It's a five-letter easily-pronounceable word. What makes it fancy or scary? I think people assume that they're scary, and then confirmation bias themselves into making them hard to learn, despite them being a reasonably simple concept overall.

As for calling them strategies… if we called them that it would make learning and understanding the intermediate and advanced concepts significantly less accessible and more difficult. We should call things what they are.

Re: Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001)

#60

Post by sbov »

hnriot wrote: post #35
jfaucett wrote: post #8

I don't see why they don't just teach C, x86, and Haskell everywhere. If you know the concepts behind these, you can quickly grok any other programming language. Also I never got the whole hype behind OOP. IMHO its self explanatory, nothing you need an entire course on to be effective and understand OOP programs. Memory layout and management, advanced pointer concepts and monads are a slightly different matter. If I…

I'm not sure pointer concepts are very difficult, pointers might confuse people that didn't grow up with assembly language, but they really aren't very hard to understand and they are also less and less relevant. Over the years the abstraction level increases, it's far better to teach people to continue computer science to the next 21st century level, not go over stuff from the 70's again that they will likely never…

I kind of feel like as long as we have imperative programming languages, pointer concepts will be useful. I mean, that's basically what references are.
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