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A primer on the cruel, tacit laws of type-level programming in Haskell
- anticristi 6y agoDoes anyone else think the title is sexist by today's standards?
- Fr33maan 6y agoI have strictly no idea why OP is using women nor in the title or illustrations
- smt88 6y agoIt's a jokey reference to the movie Mean Girls (a comedy).
- 1_player 6y agoIs mentioning women off limits nowadays? Come on. It might as well been "Kindness for Mean Boys" and the meaning and implications of it would not change a single iota, except losing the movie reference and light tone the author wanted to go for.
- Fr33maan 6y agoI dont have this reference. Kindness for mean boys would have certainly be less controversial but still off topic. Never said that mentioning women is off limits. I don t get why you ask this as an amswer to my statement. Thanks for the movie reference
- ORioN63 6y agoHe's drawing a comparison between Haskell kinds and concepts shown in the (once) popular teenage movie "Mean Girls".
- anticristi 6y agoIt reinforces the stereotype that only women are mean. I would dislike a title reinforcing stereotypes about me: "Detox for Alcoholic East Europeans: Haskell type enforcement".
- cdash 6y agoNo such stereotype says only women are mean.
- anticristi 6y agoC'mon. It's a well-known "fact" (please read that with sarcasm) that women gossip more and are more mean: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09589236.2017.1411789 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09589236.2017.14...
- bitcharmer 6y agoThis is absolutely not true where I come from. I don't think you should consider your personal beliefs and biases to be universal to the whole planet.
- FabHK 6y agoWhy the downvotes? OP put "fact" in scare quotes and provided a link to a scientific paper entirely refuting both mentioned "facts". It thus seems obvious that OP doesn't subscribe to those stereotypes, but furthermore subversively makes fun of those that do. Downvoting without checking the link... Is this Twitter here or HN?
- hadron_bumper 6y agoNot sure about this particular instance, but this user's comments in this thread show quite aggressive, preconceived and completely unnecessary stance. To people like that everything is sexist/racist/-phobic. Since HN is generally above that, comments trying to derail the actual discussion and lower the level of discourse are not welcome.
- asutekku 6y agoIt’s just a reference to the Mean Girls movie. Works well with haskell’s kind → mean.
- Fr33maan 6y agook I do understand why I didn t understood
- HighlandSpring 6y agoWould you like to elaborate how? Or are you just being pre-emptively offended on someone else's behalf?
- anticristi 6y agoMaybe I am a bit over-protective and extrapolate too much, but here is what research says: "Davies et al. (2002) showed that women experience stereotype threat when they are reminded of existing stereotypes about women in television advertising. In this study, participants watched commercials in which women were very excited about buying cosmetic products or trying a new baking recipe. After watching these commercials, women performed worse on a math test compared with men who watched the same commercials and compared with women who watched gender-neutral commercials." https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02435/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0243... I just think a more cautious analogy would have made sense.
- sweeneyrod 6y agoStereotype threat is probably not a thing https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23743603.2018.1559647 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23743603.2018.1... - publication bias
- bitcharmer 6y agoIt's quite sad that this oppression olympics is now poisoning HN's comments section.
- smt88 6y agoIt's a stupid title. Connecting the concept to a movie was unnecessary. But it's not any more sexist than making a movie called (and about) Mean Girls in the first place...
- jpxw 6y agoIt seems like a decent way to engage women in the content of the article to me. I think that is one of the aims, and why not? The article was written by a woman after all.
- anticristi 6y agoTrue, it just brings back bad memories from EU's "Science: It's a girls thing" campaign. https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2012/jun/29/science-girl-thing-viral-fiasco https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2012/jun/29/science...
- jpxw 6y agoThat initiative is indeed cringeworthy and pandering. But this article feels more organic and genuine, to me. This article was written by a woman software engineer in her own time, and not commissioned by a boardroom full of bureaucrats, maybe that is why.
- jpxw 6y agoErr, no? The article is written by a woman, by the way.
- znpy 6y agonot specific to this situation/thread, but women can be sexist too.
- lazyjones 6y agoIt's kinda nerdy and very clickbait-ish but sexist? Probably not, but who am I to judge. Old, white and male means I am not entitled to any opinion on such matters, by today's standards.
- elygre 6y agoOld, white and male — we are probably both plenty entitled. But life is generally favorable to us, so we are often better off listening to those actually affected by this.
- toolz 6y agoIs that to imply less privileged people should feel less obligated to listen or is that to imply more privileged people have less to contribute so they should default to listening? It seems highly unnecessary to devalue large categories of people based on the situations they were born into just to get across a point that listening to others is important.
- MispelledToyota 6y agoThe principle was merely that people who are not directly affected by X can particularly benefit from listening to people directly affected by X. It was even a supererogatory framing of the recommendation. But enjoy your high horse!
- jpxw 6y agoJust because you’re “old, white and male” doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to have an opinion. Don’t let anybody make you feel like that.
- ibrarmalik 6y agoI think it was obvious that he doesn't believe that and he's just playing the victim. Nobody in the comments has mentioned anything about white males not having an opinion, and this is a typical argument (and a strawman) that people use to derail the discussion.
- djdjdjd 6y agoFor me personal? No. I think it's a pop culture reference Andi don't think it is sexist.
- lewiscollard 6y agoI thought the pop-culture references were both extremely funny and well-played. It also seems that the author of the post is both a woman and alive in 2020, so no, not at all sexist by today's standards.
- bertil 6y agoThe title, I didn’t get. But the sub titles as references to St Paul’s letter to Corinthians? That was slick.
- tome 6y agoHoly 6MB 2,046px × 1,416px image, Batman!
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoYep. Multiples of them totalling 35.4MB of pointless, bandwidth-sucking stupidity.
- agumonkey 6y agoa testimony on the need to train people to think about memory with lazy fp ?
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoIf by that you mean lazily as in functional programming, I don't see that would help.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoOK, I get it finally. Bit thick today! Upvoted.
- agumonkey 6y agono worries, humorous comments are not the first expectation on HN have a nice day
- wscott 6y agoA discussion of the Haskell type system is not what I expected when clicking that link.
- neals 6y agoBe honest, what was your very first thought?
- searchableguy 6y agoI did think it was related to functional programming but wasn't entirely sure. It's HN and Americans are asleep, there are less politics and cultural articles. Kindness may be referring to higher kinded types and for mean girls probably just forced lingo to refer to people who don't take kindly to functional programming and types.
- rogual 6y agoI thought it was going to be a piece in favour of showing kindness to people who themselves are mean. (I never even considered "this is HN so it's probably tech-related". Don't know what that says about me or the site!)
- js8 6y agoYeah, me too. If it wasn't explained in the discussion, I wouldn't click on it. (Maybe HN needs some tags.) But I am actually glad it's about Haskell, I am a gonna read it now (and it's refreshing to see it being written by woman). I don't mind the movie references, I don't think it's sexist. (Quite the opposite, I think standard mathematical writing is too dry and benefits from having an unrelated theme to add a bit of spice.) Current reality is hard for everyone. When men behave like men, some women complain, when women behave like women, some men complain, it's really hard to please everyone. Take it easy, everyone.
- bananamerica 6y agoThe great high school movie with Lindsay Lohan.
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- implements 6y agoThere’s a “Stop trying to make Haskell happen, Gretchen - it’s not going to happen!” joke here, somewhere.
- Synaesthesia 6y agoHe’s ... just not your type?
- dkersten 6y agoWhat Kind of joke is that?
- roenxi 6y agoThere seems to be a nigh-irresistible urge for people, when explaining type systems, to pick examples that are absolutely useless. None of the types in the theme here make much sense. They are arbitrary. The contribution to writing a robust program is questionable and they don't do much to explain concepts. May as well stick with classic "Goats are mammals; that should be enough to get you going with OOP" examples, at least they are less distracting. I'm not a fan of this article.
- ivanbakel 6y agoThat's a problem with the domain itself. Type system examples can be two of: short, concrete, well-motivated. Short concrete examples don't have time for motivation; concrete well-motivated examples require lots of text (or else are unreadable); and short well-motivated examples are forced to be highly abstract. There's no substitute for actually encountering a real-world problem which makes you want/need type-level programming. The article makes the sensible choice of not trying to invent one for you. I don't think it should be bemoaned for that.
- danidiaz 6y agoKinds in Haskell seem to be evolving in the direction of controlling the representation of datatypes in memory. * (also called Type) is the kind of types whose values are "lifted": they can be lazy computations which might cause an infinite loop, throw an exception, and so on. There are also kinds for types whose values are "unlifted", meaning they really correspond to actual values in memory, not lazy thunks. Right now the language for expressing unlifted datatypes is quite limited. Hopefully it will be expanded so that we can write "strict Haskell" more easily. "Levity polymorphism" paper https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/levity-pldi17.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/... "Kinds are calling conventions" paper https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2019/03/eta.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2019/0... The -XUnliftedNewtypes extension https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/latest/docs/html/users_guide/glasgow_exts.html?highlight=unlifted%20newtypes#extension-UnliftedNewtypes https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/latest/docs/html/users_gui... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35318562/what-is-levity-polymorphism https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35318562/what-is-levity-... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56311510/what-does-type-signature-for-undefined-mean-in-haskell/56317845#56317845 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56311510/what-does-type-...