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Simon Peyton-Jones - A Taste of Haskell
- tomstuart 16y agoI just never get tired of watching SPJ talk. He has an amazing ability to explain complex ideas in a meaningful way, not to mention his obvious natural enthusiasm for the subject. It's also great to attend any talk where he's in the audience, because he always finds a way to ask questions which intentionally create opportunities for the speaker to look better by diving off into some interesting subtopic or area of technical detail that they've overlooked. A real talent.
- ekidd 16y agoSPJ also writes amazing papers. He always has a novel, practical idea, and he explains it clearly. For example, here's a paper he co-authored on Software Transactional Memory in Haskell: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers/stm/stm.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers... Notice the care taken to explain why STM is important, and its advantages over traditional locking (ease of use and composability). There's also two great new theoretical tidbits in this paper, the 'retry' and 'orElse' operators, which significantly expand the power of STM. SPJ's good example has filtered throughout most of the Haskell community by now. I love programming in Haskell because it gives me an excuse to read these really cool papers (and it stretches my brain until I understand them).
- eru 16y agoYes, Haskell's such an awesome language only partly because of the cool technology. The community and its leaders are the real secret sauce.
- baguasquirrel 16y agoThis was great. I just wished that more in-depth articles like this one would rise to the top just as much. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2429082 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2429082 ML may have lost the war, but from an academic and educational standpoint, folks in the ML community still have a lot to bring to the table.
- gaius 16y agoReports of ML's demise are somewhat premature. Now we call it F#...
- grav1tas 16y agoIsn't that kinda like saying the C language still lives on in the form of Java?
- Dn_Ab 16y agoWell, no. Because the distance, especially the idiomatic distance, between C and Java is much more than the distance between F# and Ocaml. The core languages of both are essentially equivalent. Ocaml and F# have diverged a fair bit in their fringes/exotic features (I can go into this in more detail) but if the bulk of your code use the more humdrum features then going between the two is trivial. A more apt analogy would be to consider two languages that extend C in different ways but for which the core of C can be used in both with almost no modification (D & C++?). I suppose a python/jython/ironpython comparison would be more accurate. p.s. with respect to grandparent, I don't subscribe to the philosophy of casting everything in terms of winner take all wars.
- dons 16y agoThough I'm not sure the SML people would agree...
- _delirium 16y agoI wonder if there'll be any effect from the fact that ML is now going to be the language used in CMU's intro CS course. They produce quite a few CS students, so there will be a cohort with at least basic familiarity with ML.
- happy4crazy 16y agoI play around with Haskell quite a bit, but not so much ML. Do you know why ML won out at CMU? I'm reading Cousineau's "The Functional Approach to Programming", which is based on ML, and I end up just translating most things into Haskell--the syntax feels much cleaner to me.
- rbanffy 16y ago"Haskell is the world's leading purely functional programming language" Why do people have to write stuff like this? What is "leading" and why would that be important? And, BTW, I am quite sure there is a lot more Erlang code running on phone centrals around the planet than Haskell code.
- BasDirks 16y agoErlang is not purely functional.
- rbanffy 16y agoWe could also say it's the leading FP language that starts with "H"...
- jrockway 16y agoWe could, but we didn't.
- rbanffy 16y agoObviously I underestimated the huge importance of being purely functional. What other purely functional languages compete for Haskell's attention share?
- eru 16y agoE.g. Clean. And perhaps Curry. (Though Curry is logical-functional and nowadays compiles down to Haskell.) There are also Spreadsheets, which are also purely functional, and even more popular to say the least but not leading. (The problem is that you can not define your own functions in Spreadsheets (without using imperative languages like Visual Basic).)
- rbanffy 16y agoI would love a spreadsheet where the functions could be written in Lisp (or something less dysfunctional than spreadsheetese). And also one where a cell could contain any value (range of cells, functions...)