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The invalid certificate and the oddball text encoding is illustrative of the Haskell programmer's inability to cope with practical computing problems.
by Tabular-Iceberg 3y ago
The invalid certificate and the oddball text encoding is illustrative of the Haskell programmer's inability to cope with practical computing problems.
- lukan 3y agoIt is from 2001. And maybe not maintained anymore. Probably also a possible explanation.
- Tabular-Iceberg 3y agoThe meme that Haskellers never accomplish anything practical is probably even older, maybe as old as the language itself.
- lynx23 3y agoThe meme likely comes from a time when monads (and therefore IO) were not invented yet.
- bazoom42 3y agoYeah, after monads were invented Haskell have conquered the world through its reputation as a practical “get things done” language.
- Symmetry 3y agoAs "A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages" put it: 1990 - A committee formed by Simon Peyton-Jones, Paul Hudak, Philip Wadler, Ashton Kutcher, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals creates Haskell, a pure, non-strict, functional language. 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?" https://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html https://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-...
- the_af 3y agoIt's a funny joke (I love that post), but it's mostly for people looking from outside in. It says nothing about actually doing IO with Haskell using monads, which is practical and done, and not particularly difficult. We shouldn't mistake memes for actual insight.
- tempodox 3y ago> and not particularly difficult. Wait until you want debug output in a deeply nested function that isn't already in the IO monad.
- jaspervdj 3y agoYou can use trace for that which is part of the base library: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-4.19.1.0/docs/Debug-Trace.html#v:trace https://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-4.19.1.0/docs/Debug...
- pyrale 3y agoUnrelated, but many thanks for organizing Zurihac year after year.
- the_af 3y agoDebugging output, or just plain debugging, is often difficult regardless of the programming language. I wouldn't say this sets Haskell apart.
- bazoom42 3y agoYeah as long as you understand how to use monads IO is easy. This is why Haskell tutorials tend to have 100 pages of dense type-theory before getting to “hello world”, while other languages have that on the first page.
- tome 3y agoI'm not sure which tutorials you're thinking of. Not this one I guess https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell_in_5_steps#Write_your_first_Haskell_program https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell_in_5_steps#Write_your_first... or this one https://riptutorial.com/haskell/example/898/hello--world- https://riptutorial.com/haskell/example/898/hello--world- Can you link to the one that has 100 pages before getting to “hello world”?
- pyrale 3y agoThe point is that encoding was not a problem just for ivory tower practicians back then. Python is an exemple of definitely-not-an-ivory-tower language that struggled with the same issues. Also the practical joke is largely independant from haskell. It's pretty much an example of shuhari principles applied.
- 7thaccount 3y agoThe main language creator himself famously called Haskell "useless". It was tongue in cheek of course.
- kqr 3y agoAlso with a very specific meaning that often gets lost. It was specifically about Haskell before there was an IO type. Without I/O operations, any language is "useless". (Further context: in the discussion Haskell is described as starting out useless and carefully approaching useful. Other languages start with the footguns and then retrofit useful limitations from the other end!)
- 7thaccount 3y agoI thought there was an interview where he said that many years after Haskell had I/O. I believe you though as I haven't been enamored with Haskell for a long time. It's a cool language, but just doesn't click with me. I can see why it does for others though.
- jasode 3y ago>The invalid certificate [...] is illustrative of the Haskell programmer's inability Why would one assume the invalid certificate is caused by that particular professor instead of the IT department's staff at the University of Calgary?
- boxed 3y agoIt's a joke.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kreetx 3y agoMy experience is that this may be illustrative of academic programmers. People working in industry are expected to produce something, regardless of the language. This is why I'd recommend academics to spend a bit of time in the industry, regardless of it feeling awkward/inconvenient, of not being given time to go deep in any specific subject.
- pyrale 3y ago> People working in industry are expected to produce something, Yeah, academics are only interested in producing silly papers to justify expensive trips to exotic conference locations. Meanwhile, industry produces important and useful stuff like Scrum™ Poker-planning estimates and Jira®-powered burndown charts to track completion of their Confluence© fully-documented user-stories.
- whiterknight 3y agoBoth are indeed ridiculous organizations. Best not to find yourself a true believer on either side.
- Kototama 3y agoDon't forget LEGO® Serious Play®.
- pyrale 3y agoShit, TIL. I can now become a Certified Lego® Serious Play® facilitator [1], with a certificate delivered by none other than: > The Authority on Professional LEGO Serious Play. [1]: https://www.serious.global/ https://www.serious.global/
- kreetx 3y agoSure, bigger companies have "molded" corners like that, too. But plenty of companies are small, where there there isn't much space in getting nothing practical done.
- 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kccqzy 3y agoThe article predates the popularity of UTF-8 encoding on the World Wide Web.