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State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016
61–67 of 67 posts
Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016
#62The author of the book mentioned has a post called: "Why we don't chuck readers into web apps"[0] that is...not encouraging. "....Understanding algebraic datatypes requires understanding products and sums. Understanding products and sums requires understanding addition, multiplication, types, cardinality, type constructors, and data constructors...." By the time I reach cardinality I wonder if maybe the author is mor…
>By the time I reach cardinality I wonder if maybe the author is more interested in making things sound intimidating than helping? I'm overstating my case in that post, but underestimating how hard this currently is doesn't change that there are things you'd want to understand before diving into a Haskell web application. Part of this is on the framework designers, it's mostly/only Scotty that has made any attempt no…
You can find out what the tone of the book is by checking out the sample provided on the book's website. No need to speculate.
You're right. I shouldn't have implied anything about the book based on this blog post. That's unreasonable. I have things I dislike about this post, but that doesn't imply anything about your book.
I should've been clearer when I first wrote my post that there's no major content in your post that I disagree with. There are a lot of things to learn before you can write actual applications in Haskell (I've been at it for awhile, and am just really getting to understand Monad Transformers). But I do think that paragraph is a bad way to put the point. It reminds me of when a student two years older than me tried to intimidate me by asking if I knew what a RECIPROCAL was.
I also think that the $BOZOLANG comment is a bad idea. Haskell has a stereotype that it's users look down on everyone else. You may think it's a nice little joke, but I'm not sure if it will translate to people who already worry about whether they're smart enough for Haskell.
Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016
#63I am a beginner Haskeller maybe just crossing the border into "intermediate." What has been most frustrating for me is not really the quality or availability of books or learning materials. Instead, it has been hard to deal with the variability in the opinions of veteran Haskellers as to what it even means to be a beginner. For example, in one job interview I had, the people interviewing me (several of whom had used…
Just like Haskell, people learn CS by lazy evaluation. Racking up bullet points is not how people should be hiring. They should be able to train you to do what they expect you to do.
Hey, I agree. I even wrote up a lengthy diatribe once about this issue [0].
But the reality is that people hire by bullet points and no engineer involved in the hiring process is going to miss a chance to assert superiority by asking about something obscure, or some riddle, or some on-the-spot whiteboard hazing.
In well-known languages, you can at least study what the hazing will consist of and memorize parts of it. But with an obscure language like Haskell, you're at the complete mercy of your interviewer. They largely can pick their own idea of "beginner" and hold you to it. I feel like it's much harder to do that for Python, Java, C++, etc.
[0] http://suitdummy.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-unicorn-inequality...
Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
>By the time I reach cardinality I wonder if maybe the author is more interested in making things sound intimidating than helping? I'm overstating my case in that post, but underestimating how hard this currently is doesn't change that there are things you'd want to understand before diving into a Haskell web application. Part of this is on the framework designers, it's mostly/only Scotty that has made any attempt no…
You can find out what the tone of the book is by checking out the sample provided on the book's website. No need to speculate. You're right. I shouldn't have implied anything about the book based on this blog post. That's unreasonable. I have things I dislike about this post, but that doesn't imply anything about your book. I should've been clearer when I first wrote my post that there's no major content in your post…
Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can find out what the tone of the book is by checking out the sample provided on the book's website. No need to speculate. You're right. I shouldn't have implied anything about the book based on this blog post. That's unreasonable. I have things I dislike about this post, but that doesn't imply anything about your book. I should've been clearer when I first wrote my post that there's no major content in your post…
http://imgur.com/K4yXrgs
Cool. I think the line below the headline still has "$BOZOLANG", btw.
Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016
#66Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Picking any compile-to-JS language (not counting ES6/7) is a risky proposition though. There are a lot of people regretting their five year-old "legacy" coffeescript applications today. GHCJS is improving at an astonishing rate, but at this point I still wouldn't use any compile-to-JS language for a serious production application. There's too high of a risk of building something that becomes unreasonably expensive to…
While I use ghcjs for one of my projects, have been a big user of Emscripten in the past, and recently switched from a CoffeeScript project to a TypeScript project at work, I understand what you're saying, but I think it's an overstatement. Compiling to JavaScript is totally okay if the new language 1) adds something meaningful (like a type system [TypeScript, js_of_ocaml] or the ability to conveniently deal with unb…
> largely because JavaScript doesn't (yet) support tail calls so the CPS transform must be trampolined
I wonder if any research has been done here as to "let the stack grow" and THEN trampoline before it overflows.