10 ms·

Why I Support the Haskell Foundation

121 points by cdsmith 5y ago

jhvkjhk 5y ago
> I’ve lost count of the stories I have heard from others about how our community welcomed them when they needed a friend, felt alienated and alone, doubted themselves, or felt like they couldn’t make it in the world. Wow, I never thought a programming language community can help people overcome negative feelings. These storeis are really nice.
- truth_ 5y ago
  Much like novels and poetry, math and programming have sincerely contributed to my happiness. It is not that I can't socialize or don't have friends, it's just that I don't like what most people do (like watching sports, and talking about uninteresting things, etc.) And save some specific people, I feel burned out after spending time with other people. I am known to many as an extremely sociable, and friendly person. I just don't like it. On top of that, being heretically progressive (truly progressive, e.g. criticizing and disliking all religions and all patriarchy- Christian, Islamic, and Hindu- not toeing the modern woke liberal agenda), I cannot freely express myself except in front of my parents, SO, and about two friends. In such a life, programming brings immense bliss. I profoundly enjoy poetry, and novels, but they are something you are consuming. I love to create things, modify and change things. Programming, whether in microcontrollers for hobby, or solving business problems with innovative solutions, or solving project Euler problems, I feel immense joy. If programming did not exist, my life would have been significantly worse.
rataata_jr 5y ago
I really love haskell, but I cant understand why everything has to be about raical diversity.
- ijlx 5y ago
  This article talked about so much more than racial diversity, is that all you got out of it?
- Ice_cream_suit 5y ago
  I had to go back and reread the article to find the reference you objected to. The article has 25 paragraphs. Near the bottom of the article, one line in one paragraph, mentioned racial diversity in passing. Is that really a problem for you ?
  - mrmonkeyman 5y ago
    Why is there even a paragraph? It's weird. Like mentioning naked mole rats. Sure, it's only one paragraph and I have nothing against naked mole rats in particular but what's the point?
- ookdatnog 5y ago
  I think there is a meaningful difference between the predicates "is about racial diversity" and "mentions racial diversity in one paragraph near the bottom".
  - rich_sasha 5y ago
    I read this as, "everything ends up having a link to racial diversity". I also don't get it, but where I live, race isn't the principal eigenvector of literally everything.
    - rscho 5y ago
      Yes, but you do have Netflix and CNN where you live, don't you? So then it's your problem too! :-p
- kqr 5y ago
  How did you arrive at the conclusion that everything has to be about racial diversity? I look at the front page of HN, and very few submissions are about racial diversity. Even in this very article (which is a tiny slice of the discussion on HN) I see very little about racial diversity. In what sense did you mean everything has to be about racial diversity?
  - vazyla 5y ago
    Because it's a programming language we're talking about, not a political party.
    - cdsmith 5y ago
      As the author of the article, I hope it's clear that we're talking about the community that has formed around the programming language. Racial diversity isn't, to the best of my knowledge, mentioned at all in the Haskell Report or the source code to the GHC compiler. But when I'm talking about the community, that is all about the people in that community. Some of the people in that community have very different backgrounds from myself, and I think that's a valuable thing to celebrate and acknowledge. That said, it wasn't the point of the article. It's fast becoming the point of this comment thread, though, which is unfortunate.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - nanna 5y ago
        The effect, if not the point, of the HN posts here decrying diversity (heavens forbid!) is to force a discussion about the value of racial diversity and racial justice. To put them under question, even if the argument itself is lost. This isn't about your post, it's about far-right trolls trying to force their culture war discourse onto this forum. A good thing their posts have been flagged.
    - kqr 5y ago
      I fall to see how that is an answer to my question. What, specifically, made you think everything is about racial diversity? I would very much like for you to explain to me how everything you read is about racial diversity, when so little of what I read seems to be.
- cdsmith 5y ago
  Thanks for the question. I'm the author of the article, and I can talk about why I included that paragraph. It's not because everything has to be about racial diversity. Rather, it's because I was already writing about some kinds of diversity, and when I reflected on people I know in the Haskell community, I realized that we've got some pretty interesting characters, and that this is due to communities like Tidal Cycles. Tidal Cycles is a great example of why something that's not at all important to corporate sponsors is nevertheless a cornerstone of the language community. I've had the chance to meet some really interesting people with interesting stories who I wouldn't have met if Haskell were just a language for writing web services.
  - 4bpp 5y ago
    Not the parent poster, but I do think it's worth putting a finger on what might simply be a cultural gap between modern (and especially fairly plugged-in) Americans and others who either genuinely have not been socialised into the present-day US discourse about race or are deliberately acting defiant about it due to how it conflicts with the framework that they grew up with. It seems to me that according to present-day American norms, including a remark such as the one that you did is simply considered good form; you show that even if you are not actively working on the great political causes that are being so eloquently argued to be of existential importance by their protagonists every day, you are certainly aware of them, support the good guys and ready to do your part for their cause if it you are in a situation in which you can contribute. Meanwhile, for those who adhere to a framework in which the prescription for making sure historical instances of racism don't repeat is to banish race as a category from human thinking and discourse as far as possible, the very mention of it in a context where there seemed to be no external reason to is gauche in a similar way to if you suddenly started talking about sexual prowess (taking care to insert a parenthetical remark about what you believe about your own). It doesn't seem to me like your explanation of the "why" here is particularly helpful to cross that gap of expectations, either; it only really makes sense if the reader is already primed to assume that describing people as "interesting characters" and unusual people must at least suggest something about race and gender, but from the other side's perspective this is not any less gauche, especially as it might be taken to suggest that what makes those characters "interesting" to you is just a matter of those characteristics. Even worse, if the culturally remote reader's degree of familiarity with modern US norms is not zero, the one blurb they likely have in mind is something like "the US has a self-admitted racism problem". In that case, a remark such as the one you made might not just register as introducing a topic that is unsuitable for polite conversation, but actually as betraying attitudes that are opposite to what you wished to communicate - imagine if for instance a speaker of the German police, talking about something mundane such as their strategies for fighting pickpockets in Frankfurt, injected a line lamenting the small number of Jews in the force. Indeed, if my read of US society is correct, antisemitism is one context in which the other (older?) version of antiracism norms still survives in it. To get a rough model of how a given post or statement would sound to the cultural outsider, then, you could try to imagine your post with everything mentioning race replaced with analogous remarks along the "Jewish or not Jewish?" axis.
xvilka 5y ago
Article mentioned Apple with their own mainstream language, I suppose Swift. But it's far from being mainstream, didn't gain the desired attention and failed miserably with TensorFlow. Thus, it's a niche language making no sense outside of the Apple ecosystem. Is not a serious contender to Haskell.
- frou_dh 5y ago
  I would love to know some actual numbers. It does seem like Swift adoption on server/Linux by people who aren't already Mac/iOS developers is horrendously low.
- auggierose 5y ago
  Swift TensorFlow wasn't an Apple thing, I think. And it never made sense in the first place ...
- apetrovic 5y ago
  Swift is mainstream in Apple ecosystem, like VB (and C# before dotnet went open source) was in MS ecosystem back in the day. I'm not questioning Haskell influence and importance, but, what you think, how many developers use Swift and get paid to work in Swift every day, compared to Haskell developers?
- mark_l_watson 5y ago
  While my preferred languages are Common Lisp, Clojure, Haskell, and Scheme, I must say that Swift is pretty nice. Apple’s supplied deep learning models are useful and easy to use, and compiling on an IPad Pro or M1 Mac is fast, even with the type inferencing. Right now I am slogging through a 50 hour SwiftUI 2 class. I am disappointed that TensorFlow for Swift has been mothballed, but Julia and Python are probably much better options for deep learning. BTW, Julia is a fairly good general purpose language also. I have played with little bits of Julia code for text manipulation, REST, SPARQL queries, etc. EDIT: since this is a Haskell thread, pardon the plug: you can grab a free copy of my Haskell book at https://markwatson.com https://markwatson.com
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Swift is mainstream on the context of Apple ecosystem. Not everyone cares about cross platform.
amelius 5y ago
Why can't FOSS projects get structural support from governments, the way science is funded?
- Santosh83 5y ago
  You're going in a dangerously socialist direction here. Let the free market sort it out, and may the best man (billionaire) win. We get innovation & progress that way.
- kungito 5y ago
  Science is funded by money from projects. You write a project proposal and apply for funding. Isn't ghc funded by money from Glasgow University or something like that?
  - mananaysiempre 5y ago
    Some contributors are, but Simon PJ is at Microsoft Research and Simon Marlow used to be too (in case you were wondering where F# came from). Also, funding projects not people is a relatively recent notion; e.g. most fundamental physics breakthroughs of the 20th century were done by people who didn’t have to write grant applications.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    Exactly - and the amount of effort this consumes is immense. You end up with grant-writing and paper-publishing institutions where the actual advance of knowledge is squeezed between the two.
    - kungito 5y ago
      But what is the alternative? You need a generic way of deciding who gets how much money and I don't see another way except for the whole project application process. The only alternative is someone gives money to things he likes... Companies can afford that but the public sector cannot because it is ripe for corruption.
    - amelius 5y ago

121 points by cdsmith 5y ago

> I’ve lost count of the stories I have heard from others about how our community welcomed them when they needed a friend, felt alienated and alone, doubted themselves, or felt like they couldn’t make it in the world. Wow, I never thought a programming language community can help people overcome negative feelings. These storeis are really nice.

truth_ 5y ago
Much like novels and poetry, math and programming have sincerely contributed to my happiness. It is not that I can't socialize or don't have friends, it's just that I don't like what most people do (like watching sports, and talking about uninteresting things, etc.) And save some specific people, I feel burned out after spending time with other people. I am known to many as an extremely sociable, and friendly person. I just don't like it. On top of that, being heretically progressive (truly progressive, e.g. criticizing and disliking all religions and all patriarchy- Christian, Islamic, and Hindu- not toeing the modern woke liberal agenda), I cannot freely express myself except in front of my parents, SO, and about two friends. In such a life, programming brings immense bliss. I profoundly enjoy poetry, and novels, but they are something you are consuming. I love to create things, modify and change things. Programming, whether in microcontrollers for hobby, or solving business problems with innovative solutions, or solving project Euler problems, I feel immense joy. If programming did not exist, my life would have been significantly worse.

rataata_jr 5y ago

I really love haskell, but I cant understand why everything has to be about raical diversity.

ijlx 5y ago
This article talked about so much more than racial diversity, is that all you got out of it?
Ice_cream_suit 5y ago
I had to go back and reread the article to find the reference you objected to. The article has 25 paragraphs. Near the bottom of the article, one line in one paragraph, mentioned racial diversity in passing. Is that really a problem for you ?
- mrmonkeyman 5y ago
  Why is there even a paragraph? It's weird. Like mentioning naked mole rats. Sure, it's only one paragraph and I have nothing against naked mole rats in particular but what's the point?
ookdatnog 5y ago
I think there is a meaningful difference between the predicates "is about racial diversity" and "mentions racial diversity in one paragraph near the bottom".
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  I read this as, "everything ends up having a link to racial diversity". I also don't get it, but where I live, race isn't the principal eigenvector of literally everything.
  - rscho 5y ago
    Yes, but you do have Netflix and CNN where you live, don't you? So then it's your problem too! :-p
kqr 5y ago
How did you arrive at the conclusion that everything has to be about racial diversity? I look at the front page of HN, and very few submissions are about racial diversity. Even in this very article (which is a tiny slice of the discussion on HN) I see very little about racial diversity. In what sense did you mean everything has to be about racial diversity?
- vazyla 5y ago
  Because it's a programming language we're talking about, not a political party.
  - cdsmith 5y ago
    As the author of the article, I hope it's clear that we're talking about the community that has formed around the programming language. Racial diversity isn't, to the best of my knowledge, mentioned at all in the Haskell Report or the source code to the GHC compiler. But when I'm talking about the community, that is all about the people in that community. Some of the people in that community have very different backgrounds from myself, and I think that's a valuable thing to celebrate and acknowledge. That said, it wasn't the point of the article. It's fast becoming the point of this comment thread, though, which is unfortunate.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - nanna 5y ago
      The effect, if not the point, of the HN posts here decrying diversity (heavens forbid!) is to force a discussion about the value of racial diversity and racial justice. To put them under question, even if the argument itself is lost. This isn't about your post, it's about far-right trolls trying to force their culture war discourse onto this forum. A good thing their posts have been flagged.
  - kqr 5y ago
    I fall to see how that is an answer to my question. What, specifically, made you think everything is about racial diversity? I would very much like for you to explain to me how everything you read is about racial diversity, when so little of what I read seems to be.
cdsmith 5y ago
Thanks for the question. I'm the author of the article, and I can talk about why I included that paragraph. It's not because everything has to be about racial diversity. Rather, it's because I was already writing about some kinds of diversity, and when I reflected on people I know in the Haskell community, I realized that we've got some pretty interesting characters, and that this is due to communities like Tidal Cycles. Tidal Cycles is a great example of why something that's not at all important to corporate sponsors is nevertheless a cornerstone of the language community. I've had the chance to meet some really interesting people with interesting stories who I wouldn't have met if Haskell were just a language for writing web services.
- 4bpp 5y ago
  Not the parent poster, but I do think it's worth putting a finger on what might simply be a cultural gap between modern (and especially fairly plugged-in) Americans and others who either genuinely have not been socialised into the present-day US discourse about race or are deliberately acting defiant about it due to how it conflicts with the framework that they grew up with. It seems to me that according to present-day American norms, including a remark such as the one that you did is simply considered good form; you show that even if you are not actively working on the great political causes that are being so eloquently argued to be of existential importance by their protagonists every day, you are certainly aware of them, support the good guys and ready to do your part for their cause if it you are in a situation in which you can contribute. Meanwhile, for those who adhere to a framework in which the prescription for making sure historical instances of racism don't repeat is to banish race as a category from human thinking and discourse as far as possible, the very mention of it in a context where there seemed to be no external reason to is gauche in a similar way to if you suddenly started talking about sexual prowess (taking care to insert a parenthetical remark about what you believe about your own). It doesn't seem to me like your explanation of the "why" here is particularly helpful to cross that gap of expectations, either; it only really makes sense if the reader is already primed to assume that describing people as "interesting characters" and unusual people must at least suggest something about race and gender, but from the other side's perspective this is not any less gauche, especially as it might be taken to suggest that what makes those characters "interesting" to you is just a matter of those characteristics. Even worse, if the culturally remote reader's degree of familiarity with modern US norms is not zero, the one blurb they likely have in mind is something like "the US has a self-admitted racism problem". In that case, a remark such as the one you made might not just register as introducing a topic that is unsuitable for polite conversation, but actually as betraying attitudes that are opposite to what you wished to communicate - imagine if for instance a speaker of the German police, talking about something mundane such as their strategies for fighting pickpockets in Frankfurt, injected a line lamenting the small number of Jews in the force. Indeed, if my read of US society is correct, antisemitism is one context in which the other (older?) version of antiracism norms still survives in it. To get a rough model of how a given post or statement would sound to the cultural outsider, then, you could try to imagine your post with everything mentioning race replaced with analogous remarks along the "Jewish or not Jewish?" axis.

xvilka 5y ago

Article mentioned Apple with their own mainstream language, I suppose Swift. But it's far from being mainstream, didn't gain the desired attention and failed miserably with TensorFlow. Thus, it's a niche language making no sense outside of the Apple ecosystem. Is not a serious contender to Haskell.

frou_dh 5y ago
I would love to know some actual numbers. It does seem like Swift adoption on server/Linux by people who aren't already Mac/iOS developers is horrendously low.
auggierose 5y ago
Swift TensorFlow wasn't an Apple thing, I think. And it never made sense in the first place ...
apetrovic 5y ago
Swift is mainstream in Apple ecosystem, like VB (and C# before dotnet went open source) was in MS ecosystem back in the day. I'm not questioning Haskell influence and importance, but, what you think, how many developers use Swift and get paid to work in Swift every day, compared to Haskell developers?
mark_l_watson 5y ago
While my preferred languages are Common Lisp, Clojure, Haskell, and Scheme, I must say that Swift is pretty nice. Apple’s supplied deep learning models are useful and easy to use, and compiling on an IPad Pro or M1 Mac is fast, even with the type inferencing. Right now I am slogging through a 50 hour SwiftUI 2 class. I am disappointed that TensorFlow for Swift has been mothballed, but Julia and Python are probably much better options for deep learning. BTW, Julia is a fairly good general purpose language also. I have played with little bits of Julia code for text manipulation, REST, SPARQL queries, etc. EDIT: since this is a Haskell thread, pardon the plug: you can grab a free copy of my Haskell book at https://markwatson.com https://markwatson.com
pjmlp 5y ago
Swift is mainstream on the context of Apple ecosystem. Not everyone cares about cross platform.

amelius 5y ago

Why can't FOSS projects get structural support from governments, the way science is funded?

Santosh83 5y ago
You're going in a dangerously socialist direction here. Let the free market sort it out, and may the best man (billionaire) win. We get innovation & progress that way.
kungito 5y ago
Science is funded by money from projects. You write a project proposal and apply for funding. Isn't ghc funded by money from Glasgow University or something like that?
- mananaysiempre 5y ago
  Some contributors are, but Simon PJ is at Microsoft Research and Simon Marlow used to be too (in case you were wondering where F# came from). Also, funding projects not people is a relatively recent notion; e.g. most fundamental physics breakthroughs of the 20th century were done by people who didn’t have to write grant applications.
- pjc50 5y ago
  Exactly - and the amount of effort this consumes is immense. You end up with grant-writing and paper-publishing institutions where the actual advance of knowledge is squeezed between the two.
  - kungito 5y ago
    But what is the alternative? You need a generic way of deciding who gets how much money and I don't see another way except for the whole project application process. The only alternative is someone gives money to things he likes... Companies can afford that but the public sector cannot because it is ripe for corruption.
  - amelius 5y ago