4 ms·

Richard O'Keefe (2013), erlang-questions mailing list: Once upon a time (about 1992ish) in a land where the moles have beaks and swim and the deer jump

by chalst 5y ago

Richard O'Keefe (2013), erlang-questions mailing list: Once upon a time (about 1992ish) in a land where the moles have beaks and swim and the deer jump on their hind legs (Australia), a certain computer science department (RMIT) decided that Pascal had reached its use-by date. What shall we do? What shall we replace it with? Set up a committee! I was on the committee. We set up a short list. (1) Scheme. Tiny language, amazingly capable, REPL so you can try things out, implementations for all the machines we cared about. And Rob Hagan at Monash had shown that you could teach students more COBOL with one semester of Scheme and one semester of COBOL than you could with three semesters of COBOL. (2) Miranda. The commercial precursor of Haskell. Melbourne University were also looking at this (or had already switched to it) which would make it easier to pick up some of their students. (3) Ada. Close enough to Pascal that our staff were comfortable with it and our material would not need major revision. A better Pascal than Pascal. Handled concurrency about as nicely as an imperative language can. What was the deciding factor? Schools. Our deliberations leaked, and we started getting phone calls from careers masters saying "if you go all theoretical [read: (1) or (2)] we'll tell our pupils not to study with you." http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2013-January/071898.html http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2013-January/07... Personally, I'd maybe not apply the adjective "smartness" here, but there is some sense in which some languages have better taste than others, and what drives language popularity is not usually good taste, and I interpret pg here to be saying he prefers to recruit programmers who show good taste in the languages they work with.

mumblemumble 5y ago
My school started everyone with a semester of Scheme, followed by a semester of C. I don't have any sort of legitimate control group to compare to, and I'm obviously biased as heck, but I do still hold the impression that I and others who learned that way can learn new languages and programming techniques much more quickly than acquaintances who were fed a steady diet of Java or Python. Many of them, even 20 years on, still don't really have a firm grasp of what single dispatch is in the first place, which hinders their ability to use it well. Which is ironic, considering it's all they've ever known. I agree; I hate the "smart" perception. My guess is that, if there's anything there, it's just the gift of a stronger grasp of the fundamentals. Scheme brings you very close to the abstract foundation of computer science. C brings you very close to the technical foundation of computer engineering. I'd like to think there's a lot of value in starting out by establishing a firm foundation like that.
- chalst 5y ago
  This is a very nice combination to have for those students who want to go deep into language implementation and its interface with OSes. C is good for understanding how to write VMs, Scheme is great for code transformation.
YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
For reference, this Richard O' Keefe: Dr. Richard A. O'Keefe is a computer scientist best known for writing the influential book on Prolog programming, The Craft of Prolog.[1] He was a lecturer and researcher at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand and concentrates on languages for logic programming and functional programming (including Prolog, Haskell, and Erlang). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_O%27Keefe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_O%27Keefe
7thaccount 5y ago
This is both troubling and understanding as someone who has been on both sides. As a student, we were required to learn assembly in a microcontrollers course. It was a disaster, because it was a very short semester and they were asking we learn microcontrollers and assembly at the same time when most of us could barely program to begin with. I left a review urging they change to C (still low level, but so much easier) and they actually switched the next year. Learning ASM is indeed important from a theoretical stance (and practical for some jobs), but you can't expect students to just pick that up in a few weeks worth of classes. Then when I got an office job, I learned a LOT of engineers do process automation programming. At that point I could see even something as hideous as VBA being used to efficiently save hundreds of hours of work. What do students really need? It depends on a lot of factors. Are they going into academia to study PL theory? Then Lisp, Prolog, C, and Haskell are probably pretty important. Are 95% of your students going into industry? Then Python, C++, Java, C#, JS, Excel, and SQL are all going to be important. I think the really theoretical stuff (Haskell, Prolog, Lisp) should only be briefly introduced in undergrad and expanded upon in grad school. Or you have specific academic or industry based programs.
- aranchelk 5y ago
  > I think the really theoretical stuff (Haskell, Prolog, Lisp) should only be briefly introduced in undergrad and expanded upon in grad school. Or you have specific academic or industry based programs. My experience is Haskell actually is highly practical for many tasks. So I think it’s misleading to call it “really theoretical”. It’s the reason you see FP in areas as diverse as spam filtering, distributed computing, smart contracts, various financial services, etc. While less common, there absolutely are areas in industry that do tend to use FP, and I don’t think you should cut students off from easily entering those specialties (or having to plan to enter them ahead of time). Additionally, there are concepts used in imperative languages which are not as easy to understand or express in those languages, e.g. promises, are more clearly expressed as monads in a language like Haskell.
  - 7thaccount 5y ago
    I think your view of Haskell's use in industry is skewed by HN. Yes there are SOME Haskell jobs, but it's not even in the top 50 languages last I checked (or if it is, it is still far down the list). A student getting a job doing spam filtering in Haskell for FB would be a nearly zero probability event in comparison to something in Java. Just go look for Haskell job postings. I bet it's 0.0001% of something like C#. So when you say uncommon, I see exceedingly rare. Every hour of student time is precious, so a single course covering PL theory in undergrad that introduces the concepts should be plenty. If someone really needs to learn Haskell in industry (a unicorn case), they can do it there. Otherwise the focus should be on practical experience and theory relevant to 95% of computer science and related jobs (object oriented programming, SQL or NoSQL databases, algorithms, web development, networks, operating systems, cloud computing...etc).
jimbokun 5y ago
This is a great quote: > And Rob Hagan at Monash had shown that you could teach students more COBOL with one semester of Scheme and one semester of COBOL than you could with three semesters of COBOL. Really makes the point about how studying uncommon languages can pay off.

by chalst 5y ago

mumblemumble 5y ago

My school started everyone with a semester of Scheme, followed by a semester of C. I don't have any sort of legitimate control group to compare to, and I'm obviously biased as heck, but I do still hold the impression that I and others who learned that way can learn new languages and programming techniques much more quickly than acquaintances who were fed a steady diet of Java or Python. Many of them, even 20 years on, still don't really have a firm grasp of what single dispatch is in the first place, which hinders their ability to use it well. Which is ironic, considering it's all they've ever known. I agree; I hate the "smart" perception. My guess is that, if there's anything there, it's just the gift of a stronger grasp of the fundamentals. Scheme brings you very close to the abstract foundation of computer science. C brings you very close to the technical foundation of computer engineering. I'd like to think there's a lot of value in starting out by establishing a firm foundation like that.

chalst 5y ago
This is a very nice combination to have for those students who want to go deep into language implementation and its interface with OSes. C is good for understanding how to write VMs, Scheme is great for code transformation.

YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago

For reference, this Richard O' Keefe: Dr. Richard A. O'Keefe is a computer scientist best known for writing the influential book on Prolog programming, The Craft of Prolog.[1] He was a lecturer and researcher at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand and concentrates on languages for logic programming and functional programming (including Prolog, Haskell, and Erlang). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_O%27Keefe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_O%27Keefe

7thaccount 5y ago

This is both troubling and understanding as someone who has been on both sides. As a student, we were required to learn assembly in a microcontrollers course. It was a disaster, because it was a very short semester and they were asking we learn microcontrollers and assembly at the same time when most of us could barely program to begin with. I left a review urging they change to C (still low level, but so much easier) and they actually switched the next year. Learning ASM is indeed important from a theoretical stance (and practical for some jobs), but you can't expect students to just pick that up in a few weeks worth of classes. Then when I got an office job, I learned a LOT of engineers do process automation programming. At that point I could see even something as hideous as VBA being used to efficiently save hundreds of hours of work. What do students really need? It depends on a lot of factors. Are they going into academia to study PL theory? Then Lisp, Prolog, C, and Haskell are probably pretty important. Are 95% of your students going into industry? Then Python, C++, Java, C#, JS, Excel, and SQL are all going to be important. I think the really theoretical stuff (Haskell, Prolog, Lisp) should only be briefly introduced in undergrad and expanded upon in grad school. Or you have specific academic or industry based programs.

aranchelk 5y ago
> I think the really theoretical stuff (Haskell, Prolog, Lisp) should only be briefly introduced in undergrad and expanded upon in grad school. Or you have specific academic or industry based programs. My experience is Haskell actually is highly practical for many tasks. So I think it’s misleading to call it “really theoretical”. It’s the reason you see FP in areas as diverse as spam filtering, distributed computing, smart contracts, various financial services, etc. While less common, there absolutely are areas in industry that do tend to use FP, and I don’t think you should cut students off from easily entering those specialties (or having to plan to enter them ahead of time). Additionally, there are concepts used in imperative languages which are not as easy to understand or express in those languages, e.g. promises, are more clearly expressed as monads in a language like Haskell.
- 7thaccount 5y ago
  I think your view of Haskell's use in industry is skewed by HN. Yes there are SOME Haskell jobs, but it's not even in the top 50 languages last I checked (or if it is, it is still far down the list). A student getting a job doing spam filtering in Haskell for FB would be a nearly zero probability event in comparison to something in Java. Just go look for Haskell job postings. I bet it's 0.0001% of something like C#. So when you say uncommon, I see exceedingly rare. Every hour of student time is precious, so a single course covering PL theory in undergrad that introduces the concepts should be plenty. If someone really needs to learn Haskell in industry (a unicorn case), they can do it there. Otherwise the focus should be on practical experience and theory relevant to 95% of computer science and related jobs (object oriented programming, SQL or NoSQL databases, algorithms, web development, networks, operating systems, cloud computing...etc).

jimbokun 5y ago

This is a great quote: > And Rob Hagan at Monash had shown that you could teach students more COBOL with one semester of Scheme and one semester of COBOL than you could with three semesters of COBOL. Really makes the point about how studying uncommon languages can pay off.