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Haskell Researchers Announce Discovery of Industry Programmer Who Gives a Shit
- angusgr 16y agoI chuckled, and I'm happy Steve Yegge might blog some more, but this feels a bit like shooting fish in a barrel.
- zaphar 16y agoAs a "sort of" haskell programmer recently I admit I found it quite funny.
- joshes 16y agoIf only because you could fit all of the Haskell programmers into a barrel of standard size? I think that's the point of the article, actually.
- angusgr 16y agoMore because it's easy to poke fun at Haskell in this way, even the Haskell people know they come off as obtuse and academic. AFAIK there's been much soul-searching in their community about how to get past that. While Steve Yegge is a good satirist, I see this post as an extended version of this joke from the "Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages": Haskell gets some resistance due to the complexity of using monads to control side effects. Wadler tries to appease critics by explaining that "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?"
- jfb 16y agoI love that joke, because I barely understand it, but minimal understanding just makes it funnier.
- csantini 16y ago"Finding a person who gives a shit about Haskell is an inherently NP-complete computer science problem. It's similar in scope and complexity to the problem of trying to find a tenured academic who didn't have the bulk of his or her work done by uncredited graduate students."
- prosa 16y agoSurely you could implement this search in at least O(n) time?
- eru 16y agoAt least is easy. At most is hard.
- wahnfrieden 16y ago"At least, if not better." The context disambiguates the direction of magnitude.
- aperiodic 16y agoThat's assuming that you can verify whether or not any given person gives a shit about Haskell in O(1) time.
- nickik 16y ago"I believe the root cause of the popularity problem is Haskell's lack of reasonable support for mutually recursive generic container types." -- Super funny!
- j_baker 16y ago"If we can create a monadic composition-functor wrapper that is perceived as sufficiently sexy by hardened industry veterans, then I think we will see an uptick in giving a shit, possibly as much as a full extra person."
- j_baker 16y ago"We crafted a fake satirical post lampooning Haskell as an unusable, overly complex turd -- a writing task that was emotionally difficult but conceptually trivial." - This is pure gold.
- samstokes 16y agoThe only thing I liked about the article was the implied possibility of that sentence being self-referential.
- gvb 16y agoOn the "truth is stranger than fiction" front, I got a good chuckle from the monads-in-Perl link http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=620692 http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=620692: "Anyway, I think it would be worth doing, if it could be expressed readably, but I was not able to figure out a way to do that." There is some deep irony in monads in Perl not being readable enough for Perl.
- JoachimSchipper 16y agoActually, the "modern Perl" people are promoting a Perl style where your program contains more letters than special characters. They seem quite influential.
- alphaoverlord 16y agoSniff sniff. Whats that smell? O right, Onion worthy.
- mixmax 16y agoIf Douglas Adams were to write about programming this is how he would do it. That's a compliment.
- yters 16y agoOr the Onion. Not as much of a compliment...
- snth 16y agoI agree that this seems to be exactly in the style of an Onion article; however, I think The Onion has put out some hilarious stuff. For example: http://www.theonion.com/articles/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-blades,11056/ http://www.theonion.com/articles/fuck-everything-were-doing-...
- presidentender 16y agoWill there every be a satirical Steve Yegge post on HN that spawns any discussion other than quotes from the article itself?
- derefr 16y agoThat's what makes Yegge posts so long, I think: he thinks of everything people could say in response to his original "core" post, and then includes it in the post itself.
- codexon 16y ago<Insert Dons and the usual angry Haskell fanboy diatribes here> </satire>
- brian6 16y agoThis successfully trolled me, because I think Haskell is really good stuff made by really smart and cool people. Surely there was a better target for satire. I'm an industry programmer (in C). I also have a bunch of packages on Hackage.
- wtracy 16y agoAre you sure it's not making fun of the people who don't use Haskell?
- jmillikin 16y ago140 points? Really? I know it's fashionable in these parts to make fun of Haskell, but it's just not funny unless the writer knows something about the language. Would you upvote these articles? * Why C++ is More Object-Oriented Than Smalltalk * Stupid Ivory-Tower Academics Claim "Perl Is Too Slow for Weather Simulation" * LISP: It Would Be a Lot More Useful Without All the Parentheses It's especially galling considering pg's various articles on language expressiveness; remember this quote, folks? """As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the power continuum, he knows he's looking down. Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used to. But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub.""" When somebody tosses around phrases like how to subvert Haskell's type system to accomplish basic shit you can do in other languages, it's a big red flag that they've never used Haskell, and possibly have never even seen Haskell code.
- pavelludiq 16y agoI don't believe this article was meant to make fun of Haskell, more to make fun of Haskell fans lack of a sense of humor. Don't take it too seriously.
- jmillikin 16y agoI'm not taking it seriously, I'm just sort of baffled about it. If this were an article talking about how FORTRAN is never used in industry because punch cards are too expensive, it would garner a few votes before being eventually buried. Perhaps one or two quick comments about how the author is uninformed. Ditto somebody making fun of Erlang because nobody's written a web browser in it yet, or elaborating on why Python's poor industry adoption is because of mandatory whitespace. There's a lot of material that could go into a satire on Haskell. For example, one could mention its extant-but-completely-useless shared library support. Or how quick midnight hacks end up becoming part of the language's standard definition. Or even the absolute absurdity of a package publishing system that mandates bumping your package version every time a dependency has a new release. But he doesn't talk about any of that; anybody who's bothered to google for "haskell" has read his material on half a dozen blogs. "Monads are hard" is right up there with "why shouldn't I just make everything global?" in the list of topics useful for juicing pagerank, but nothing more.
- davidmathers 16y ago"Avoid success at all costs." I mentioned this at a talk I gave about Haskell a few years back and it’s become quite widely quoted. When a language becomes too well known, or too widely used and too successful suddenly you can’t change anything anymore. You get caught and spend ages talking about things that have nothing to do with the research side of things. Success is great, but it comes at a price. -- Simon Peyton Jones
- natmaster 16y agoFacebook uses haskell. https://www.facebook.com/careers/puzzles.php https://www.facebook.com/careers/puzzles.php (They only accept answers in languages they actually use.)
- yters 16y agoShe explained the trap they set for Briars: "We crafted a fake satirical post lampooning Haskell as an unusable, overly complex turd -- a writing task that was emotionally difficult but conceptually trivial. Then we laced the post with deeper social subtext decrying the endemic superficiality and laziness of global industry programming culture, to make ourselves feel better. Finally, each of us upvoted the post, which was unexpectedly contentious because nobody could agree on what the [HN] voting arrows actually mean." Apparently their approach was more successful than they thought.
- JonnieCache 16y agoIf you don't find this funny, then you really need to examine your sense of humour, because this is not about making fun of haskell. It's barely about haskell at all. It is fantastically well constructed exercise in comic writing. Stop thinking about the programming language wars for one minute and reread the text again, and look at the multileveled semantic games the author is playing. I thought most here were good at that? Doug Hofstadter would be proud.
- rapind 16y agoLoved the article, but someone please explain "faster than a teabagger with a grade-school arithmetic book". I'm pretty sure I got all the others.
- gvb 16y ago...their Giving a Shit gene shuts down faster than a teabagger with a grade-school arithmetic book. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_movement#Use_of_term_.22teabagger.22 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_movement#Use_of_term_... The implication is that TEA party constituents have no interest in actually understanding the grade-school math necessary to understand a budget.
- rapind 16y agoThank you very much (Canuck here so I don't usually get the political references).
- WildUtah 16y agoThere is a political movement in the USA called the Tea Party that included some demonstrations a couple years ago where they waved tea bags and called themselves teabaggers as a nickname. Of course, teabagging has a risqué sexual connotation so the movement's opponents latched onto the nickname as the proponents dropped it. The Tea Partiers are known for budget illiteracy, often suggesting impossible or mathematically absurd ideas to arrange government spending. At the lowest levels they suggest that cutting foreign aid and sex education will balance the federal budget. At the highest levels, they praise "courageous" budget plans like Paul Ryan's hand-waving and prayer plan to balance the budget by cutting taxes on the wealthiest and hoping that growth trickles down to all of us and health care costs magically stop rising. In between are the signs waving "keep the government's filthy hands off my medicare," the epitome of Tea Party campaigning this year. So the story suggests that Tea Partiers have an aversion to basic arithmetic.
- jacoblyles 16y agoIn most of California and other hip areas of the country it is considered the height of wit to refer to people who support the tea party movement by puerile grade school insults ("teabaggers" - implying that they have something to do with scrotums). It is also assumed that anyone who deviates from the prevailing left-wing fashion must be unintelligent. It is very rare that a supporter of the tea parties actually read any of these descriptions, since fashionable leftists primarily use such insults to signal to each other how enlightened they are. Referring to supporters of the tea party as "tea baggers" gets you +1 left-wing cred points. Unfortunately, I live in California and frequent hacker news, so I'm the rare person who is insulted on quite a regular basis by my peers who assume I will think more highly of them for peppering such insults throughout non-political conversations (Hey, a satirical article on Haskell! Oh look, another person calling me an idiot for giving a shit about the size of the federal budget and wanting to do something about it before we go bankrupt.)
- edw519 16y agoThis was actually a personally test disguised as a blog post. See how you scored: If you didn't understand it: You're not a hacker and never will be; go get your MBA. If it upset you: You are a hacker without a sense of humor. You belong in a room without other people. Fed Ex will deliver your circuit boards tomorrow. If you laughed once: You are an aspiring junior programmer. Keep on working hard and best wishes to you. If you laughed more than once: You are a seasoned hacker. Nice to see you here. If you sprayed Mountain Dew on your keyboard: You have that rare combination of understanding both bits and people. You must do great work. If you are cutting and pasting these gems for your bulletin board: You and I must be kindred spirits. Email me. Let's do a start-up together.
- Alternatively 16y agoIf you write a post attempting to categorize everyone's sociability and competence based on how close their reactions are to yours: You are edw519
- tumult 16y agoGHC Haskell actually supports mutually recursive generic container types, but you must enable type class system extensions which make type checking undecidable.
- mkramlich 16y agomy new favorite Yegge post. very funny. and so true. :)
- stylejam 16y agoHonestly I think this is my personal funniest post of 2010. And no, it's not making fun of Haskell.