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> Leave it to a Haskell coder to make an incomprehensible mess of matrices under addition. Since we are supposed to explain downvotes: this seems to me like

by JadeNB 10y ago

> Leave it to a Haskell coder to make an incomprehensible mess of matrices under addition. Since we are supposed to explain downvotes: this seems to me like useless anti-snobbery. Even a minor variation like "Although I believe that I understand matrix addition well, I had difficulty understanding the translation into Haskell" seems more constructive. (On the other hand, CTRL+Fing the article, which I haven't yet read, doesn't show any mention of addition. Are you pointing out that this is matrix addition in a cumbersome disguise? That, too, would have been more useful, without even having to make any linguistic slurs.)

pvg 10y ago
Since we are supposed to explain downvotes We aren't. If anything, we're encouraged not to talk about vote meta stuff. You can just reply if you want to reply and vote however you want (or not at all), independently of that.
ajamesm 10y ago
Yes, this is matrix addition in a cumbersome disguise. Haskell is a fine language, it's the authors I can't stand. I'm anti-snobbery because snobbery keeps people from understanding stuff. Programming languages are about building a standard and a foundation for common understanding -- Haskell articles are all CV-fodder about byzantine type algebras.
- LolWolf 10y ago
  I do agree with the anti-snobbery part, but, again, as someone who totally skipped over the Haskell parts (which were mostly gibberish to me), I still think the article was quite enlightening. Of course, it's also a matter of the audience you're picking, I wouldn't talk about optimization algorithms, convexity, and computational hardness to an audience of 10-year-olds first learning to program (even though it underlies everything they will do in any first programming class which can be done efficiently), but I also wouldn't discuss introductory programming topics and the definition of a Turing machine to an audience of theoretical computer scientists, even if that's what we end up talking about in a very abstracted sense.
- sn0wleopard 10y ago
  I'm sad that you found my blog post snobbish. If you point out specifically which part you can't stand I'll see if I can make it better. But I'm afraid I can't remove the algebra part, as there will be nothing left! Haskell is certainly not essential to understand or explain the algebra, but having an implementation (in any language!) helps to play with the algebra and experiment with possible models. I am a beginner in Haskell, and that's my current language of choice, as I'm keen to get better at it. To respond to your comment about matrices: I'm pretty sure one can come up with a matrix-based model (instance) of the algebra. So, no arguments here. In fact, I'd be very interested to see such an instance, to add it to other instances I've found.
  - ajamesm 10y ago
    I didn't find the post itself to be snobbish. I liked the tone and pacing, I think that your algebra makes for an interesting topic, and it was laudable for you to write about it. What I dislike is the bait-and-switch, wherein the lede implies a digression on an math topic, then the bulk of the content is going over mundane Haskell code. I don't care if Haskell coders want to get together and code golf their homomorphisms all day, but I find it exploitative to package that up as an excursion into algebra. As someone who's interested in math, but honestly couldn't care less about Haskell, these posts are all noise to me.
    - kmill 10y ago
      In case you missed the tags right under the title: "coding, math; algebra, haskell." I wouldn't call this a bait-and-switch. (I was happy enough to learn that graph join and graph union distribute, and that they satisfy a certain algebraic relation. Though I wouldn't have minded more math.) Sometimes I find that code works as a clear notation for math. Maybe you just have something against Haskell, but all of this could have been written in any other modern language without too much effort, and I find Haskell to be more on the mathy end. (By the way, I can't tell if you're against Haskell or homomorphisms!) And I think this really is an excursion into algebra, more on the general algebraic structures end of things. One might say that this describes an algebraic theory of graphs, where your matrix representation is a particular construction which satisfies the theory. The very end, the "Basic" type, feels quite a lot like reading a book on general algebraic structures. I have some questions about this algebra, like how decompositions work, and maybe I'll think about them sometime.

by JadeNB 10y ago

pvg 10y ago

Since we are supposed to explain downvotes We aren't. If anything, we're encouraged not to talk about vote meta stuff. You can just reply if you want to reply and vote however you want (or not at all), independently of that.

ajamesm 10y ago

Yes, this is matrix addition in a cumbersome disguise. Haskell is a fine language, it's the authors I can't stand. I'm anti-snobbery because snobbery keeps people from understanding stuff. Programming languages are about building a standard and a foundation for common understanding -- Haskell articles are all CV-fodder about byzantine type algebras.

LolWolf 10y ago
I do agree with the anti-snobbery part, but, again, as someone who totally skipped over the Haskell parts (which were mostly gibberish to me), I still think the article was quite enlightening. Of course, it's also a matter of the audience you're picking, I wouldn't talk about optimization algorithms, convexity, and computational hardness to an audience of 10-year-olds first learning to program (even though it underlies everything they will do in any first programming class which can be done efficiently), but I also wouldn't discuss introductory programming topics and the definition of a Turing machine to an audience of theoretical computer scientists, even if that's what we end up talking about in a very abstracted sense.
sn0wleopard 10y ago
I'm sad that you found my blog post snobbish. If you point out specifically which part you can't stand I'll see if I can make it better. But I'm afraid I can't remove the algebra part, as there will be nothing left! Haskell is certainly not essential to understand or explain the algebra, but having an implementation (in any language!) helps to play with the algebra and experiment with possible models. I am a beginner in Haskell, and that's my current language of choice, as I'm keen to get better at it. To respond to your comment about matrices: I'm pretty sure one can come up with a matrix-based model (instance) of the algebra. So, no arguments here. In fact, I'd be very interested to see such an instance, to add it to other instances I've found.
- ajamesm 10y ago
  I didn't find the post itself to be snobbish. I liked the tone and pacing, I think that your algebra makes for an interesting topic, and it was laudable for you to write about it. What I dislike is the bait-and-switch, wherein the lede implies a digression on an math topic, then the bulk of the content is going over mundane Haskell code. I don't care if Haskell coders want to get together and code golf their homomorphisms all day, but I find it exploitative to package that up as an excursion into algebra. As someone who's interested in math, but honestly couldn't care less about Haskell, these posts are all noise to me.
  - kmill 10y ago
    In case you missed the tags right under the title: "coding, math; algebra, haskell." I wouldn't call this a bait-and-switch. (I was happy enough to learn that graph join and graph union distribute, and that they satisfy a certain algebraic relation. Though I wouldn't have minded more math.) Sometimes I find that code works as a clear notation for math. Maybe you just have something against Haskell, but all of this could have been written in any other modern language without too much effort, and I find Haskell to be more on the mathy end. (By the way, I can't tell if you're against Haskell or homomorphisms!) And I think this really is an excursion into algebra, more on the general algebraic structures end of things. One might say that this describes an algebraic theory of graphs, where your matrix representation is a particular construction which satisfies the theory. The very end, the "Basic" type, feels quite a lot like reading a book on general algebraic structures. I have some questions about this algebra, like how decompositions work, and maybe I'll think about them sometime.