10 ms·

Leaving Microsoft

304 points by protothomas 14y ago

jlouis 14y ago
This may be either disastrous or magnificent. I think it may end up being the latter.
dbaupp 14y ago
It should be made clear in the title that Haskell isn't leaving MS, rather it is one of the lead developers of GHC, Simon Marlow.
- bbotond 14y ago
  Agreed. It should be "GHC Developer Leaving Microsoft".
  - pyre 14y ago
    It's the subject of the mailing list message (the [Haskell] being the mailing list subject prefix). I was able to piece together what it meant, but I know that a couple of key people for ghc work for Microsoft Research. I agree in general that it's confusing, but it's not like this is the subject of blog post that was poorly chosen. The 'real' subject is just "Leaving Microsoft".
    - jeremyjh 14y ago
      And how would we know that before we click on the link bait?
      - ben0x539 14y ago
        Complain to the policy or machinery against editorializing titles that makes every submission title converge towards the <title> on the linked page.
  - aristidb 14y ago
    "GHC Developer Simon Marlow Leaving Microsoft" :)
mej10 14y ago
Does this mean that Facebook is using Haskell more these days?
- davidw 14y ago
  Nah, it means that Simon Marlow harbored a latent desire to go code in PHP.
  - ygra 14y ago
    Facebook is about equally PHP and C++ these days.
    - amackera 14y ago
      This really boggles my mind. Facebook's stack is intriguing.
- pionar 14y ago
  Or that they will be, or that FB wants to create its own language ala Google.
- NullSet 14y ago
  I think they might be. Bryan O'Sullivan has been working for them for some time now.
  - pufuwozu 14y ago
    From what I can tell, Bryan mostly works in Python and C at Facebook.
    - dochtman 14y ago
      He recently gave a Haskell course there, I think. Bob Ippolito was talking about that.
- chriseidhof 14y ago
smenyp 14y ago
FYI, Simon Marlow is incredibly big in the Haskell community and is the leading expert in Multi core parallelism via STMs in Haskell. Some of the work he has done for the GHC compiler is frankly fantastic. This is incredibly big news in the Haskell world. The FP community is starting to break boundaries with the industry in the last 5 years with Clojure (and Scala's functional support). Currently, FB seems to use haskell only for basic lexing and parsing[1]. It would be tremendous to see them using it at FB scale. I think there's going to be gain for both parties - For FB, the publicity and hacker outreach, and Haskell - industrial reliability. [1]: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_industry http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_industry
- wink 14y ago
  Please note that although the latest commits on [1] were 2 months ago, for a long while it hasn't been updated and/or usable to a decent degree. It seemed to have been deprecated in favor of [2] when the original author of lex-pass left Facebook. Sorry if any of this information is a little off/incomplete, I think it's been 2 years when I oversaw a BSc paper revolving around extending lex-pass. [1]: https://github.com/facebook/lex-pass https://github.com/facebook/lex-pass [2]: https://github.com/facebook/pfff https://github.com/facebook/pfff
  - fdomig 14y ago
    The corresponding BSc paper may be found and downloaded here http://blog.seric.at/2010/07/19/automatic-anti-pattern-corrections-for-php/ http://blog.seric.at/2010/07/19/automatic-anti-pattern-corre...
- gordonguthrie 14y ago
  Pedant calling - Erlang is a functional programming language that has been doing very nicely thank you in a lot of big companies (Amazon, Facebook amongst others) for a good while now.
  - elemeno 14y ago
    And F# in the financial world, along with Scala. Other Functional languages are being used more as well, but since a huge amount of financial software sits on either a .Net or a Java stack, using FP languages which can easily interop with the rest of your libraries makes life a lot easier.
Narretz 14y ago
GHC? Great Haskell Collider?
- dochtman 14y ago
  Glasgow Haskell Compiler. http://lmgtfy.com/?q=ghc http://lmgtfy.com/?q=ghc
- sanxiyn 14y ago
  Glorious Haskell Compiler, actually.
  - tikhonj 14y ago
    Or, if you look at ghc --version, it's "The Glorious Glasgow Haskell Compilation System".
- venomsnake 14y ago
  Well the strong type system ensures that no collisions are possible. GHC is quite the software gem. I love haskell more and more. Everything that is so simple to write, has no right of being so fast.
  - jeremyjh 14y ago
    I agree. The type inference is a beautiful thing. I had started a project in Scala and I'm finding it hard to stay interested when Haskell is so much more interesting to me. But Scala is a LOT more practical for my project. :(
    - koide 14y ago
      Care to elaborate a bit on that? Why is Haskell much more interesting?
      - jeremyjh 14y ago
        I just meant it is more interesting to me right now. Scala is really interesting too, but I've been working with it longer. So its just relative to my current interests. I like being challenged to take a purely functional approach to problem solving. One thing I like better about Haskell which is not time-bound to my own journey is that the language is so much cleaner and more concise. In functional programming it is idiomatic to compose lots of small functions that may be only a single (short) expression each. In Scala this may mean 20-40% of the characters in a line are simply type specifications for your function arguments. I find that oppressive.
Yoric 14y ago
Wow, talk about a shock. I hope that this is good news for functional programming and the programming language community, rather than just good news for Facebook.
jheriko 14y ago
i'm assuming this guy has done real world work before? the idea of a compiler/language lead programmer effectively having lived in academia is terrifying on many levels. best of luck to him at any rate. haskell and ghc are a cool language and compiler combo, one i have enjoyed for recreational programming time and time again.
- freyrs3 14y ago
  > i'm assuming this guy has done real world work before? Yes, very much. He's one of the leading voices in the parallel Haskell world and a very accomplished programmer: * http://hackage.haskell.org/package/stm http://hackage.haskell.org/package/stm * http://hackage.haskell.org/package/async http://hackage.haskell.org/package/async * http://hackage.haskell.org/package/happy http://hackage.haskell.org/package/happy
- plinkplonk 14y ago
  "The idea of a compiler/language lead programmer effectively having lived in academia is terrifying on many levels." The apparent cluelessness level of this statement is so high, I am unable to decide if this is just ignorance or very sophisticated trolling. If the compiler dev working in a university or a research lab while developing the compiler is "terrifying", you should avoid C, C++, and Python, not to mention smalltalk, Pascal, Prolog, Common Lisp, Scheme, SML and OCaml .... There is always PHP. Turing Completeness FTW.
  - tensor 14y ago
    It's tempting to down vote him, but at the same time this is a real sentiment that some people seem to have. Perhaps it should be grouped into the current anti-intellectual trend. Either way, it's a real problem.
    - vitalique 14y ago
      >It's tempting to down vote him Why? Ignoring the ignorance does no good. Trend you've mentioned is nothing new, sadly, but if you are on the weaker side (the one that intellectuals always tend to find themselves on), the way to win is not to try to down vote clueless guys into the light-grey invisibility, imo, but to try to explain to them what's wrong with their view of the world.
mattquiros 14y ago
This email was sent yesterday, how come it's in Courier New?

304 points by protothomas 14y ago

This may be either disastrous or magnificent. I think it may end up being the latter.

It should be made clear in the title that Haskell isn't leaving MS, rather it is one of the lead developers of GHC, Simon Marlow.

bbotond 14y ago
Agreed. It should be "GHC Developer Leaving Microsoft".
- pyre 14y ago
  It's the subject of the mailing list message (the [Haskell] being the mailing list subject prefix). I was able to piece together what it meant, but I know that a couple of key people for ghc work for Microsoft Research. I agree in general that it's confusing, but it's not like this is the subject of blog post that was poorly chosen. The 'real' subject is just "Leaving Microsoft".
  - jeremyjh 14y ago
    And how would we know that before we click on the link bait?
    - ben0x539 14y ago
      Complain to the policy or machinery against editorializing titles that makes every submission title converge towards the <title> on the linked page.
- aristidb 14y ago
  "GHC Developer Simon Marlow Leaving Microsoft" :)

mej10 14y ago

Does this mean that Facebook is using Haskell more these days?

davidw 14y ago
Nah, it means that Simon Marlow harbored a latent desire to go code in PHP.
- ygra 14y ago
  Facebook is about equally PHP and C++ these days.
  - amackera 14y ago
    This really boggles my mind. Facebook's stack is intriguing.
pionar 14y ago
Or that they will be, or that FB wants to create its own language ala Google.
NullSet 14y ago
I think they might be. Bryan O'Sullivan has been working for them for some time now.
- pufuwozu 14y ago
  From what I can tell, Bryan mostly works in Python and C at Facebook.
  - dochtman 14y ago
    He recently gave a Haskell course there, I think. Bob Ippolito was talking about that.
chriseidhof 14y ago

smenyp 14y ago

FYI, Simon Marlow is incredibly big in the Haskell community and is the leading expert in Multi core parallelism via STMs in Haskell. Some of the work he has done for the GHC compiler is frankly fantastic. This is incredibly big news in the Haskell world. The FP community is starting to break boundaries with the industry in the last 5 years with Clojure (and Scala's functional support). Currently, FB seems to use haskell only for basic lexing and parsing[1]. It would be tremendous to see them using it at FB scale. I think there's going to be gain for both parties - For FB, the publicity and hacker outreach, and Haskell - industrial reliability. [1]: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_industry http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_industry

wink 14y ago
Please note that although the latest commits on [1] were 2 months ago, for a long while it hasn't been updated and/or usable to a decent degree. It seemed to have been deprecated in favor of [2] when the original author of lex-pass left Facebook. Sorry if any of this information is a little off/incomplete, I think it's been 2 years when I oversaw a BSc paper revolving around extending lex-pass. [1]: https://github.com/facebook/lex-pass https://github.com/facebook/lex-pass [2]: https://github.com/facebook/pfff https://github.com/facebook/pfff
- fdomig 14y ago
  The corresponding BSc paper may be found and downloaded here http://blog.seric.at/2010/07/19/automatic-anti-pattern-corrections-for-php/ http://blog.seric.at/2010/07/19/automatic-anti-pattern-corre...
gordonguthrie 14y ago
Pedant calling - Erlang is a functional programming language that has been doing very nicely thank you in a lot of big companies (Amazon, Facebook amongst others) for a good while now.
- elemeno 14y ago
  And F# in the financial world, along with Scala. Other Functional languages are being used more as well, but since a huge amount of financial software sits on either a .Net or a Java stack, using FP languages which can easily interop with the rest of your libraries makes life a lot easier.

Narretz 14y ago

GHC? Great Haskell Collider?

dochtman 14y ago
Glasgow Haskell Compiler. http://lmgtfy.com/?q=ghc http://lmgtfy.com/?q=ghc
sanxiyn 14y ago
Glorious Haskell Compiler, actually.
- tikhonj 14y ago
  Or, if you look at ghc --version, it's "The Glorious Glasgow Haskell Compilation System".
venomsnake 14y ago
Well the strong type system ensures that no collisions are possible. GHC is quite the software gem. I love haskell more and more. Everything that is so simple to write, has no right of being so fast.
- jeremyjh 14y ago
  I agree. The type inference is a beautiful thing. I had started a project in Scala and I'm finding it hard to stay interested when Haskell is so much more interesting to me. But Scala is a LOT more practical for my project. :(
  - koide 14y ago
    Care to elaborate a bit on that? Why is Haskell much more interesting?
    - jeremyjh 14y ago
      I just meant it is more interesting to me right now. Scala is really interesting too, but I've been working with it longer. So its just relative to my current interests. I like being challenged to take a purely functional approach to problem solving. One thing I like better about Haskell which is not time-bound to my own journey is that the language is so much cleaner and more concise. In functional programming it is idiomatic to compose lots of small functions that may be only a single (short) expression each. In Scala this may mean 20-40% of the characters in a line are simply type specifications for your function arguments. I find that oppressive.

Yoric 14y ago

Wow, talk about a shock. I hope that this is good news for functional programming and the programming language community, rather than just good news for Facebook.

jheriko 14y ago

i'm assuming this guy has done real world work before? the idea of a compiler/language lead programmer effectively having lived in academia is terrifying on many levels. best of luck to him at any rate. haskell and ghc are a cool language and compiler combo, one i have enjoyed for recreational programming time and time again.

freyrs3 14y ago
> i'm assuming this guy has done real world work before? Yes, very much. He's one of the leading voices in the parallel Haskell world and a very accomplished programmer: * http://hackage.haskell.org/package/stm http://hackage.haskell.org/package/stm * http://hackage.haskell.org/package/async http://hackage.haskell.org/package/async * http://hackage.haskell.org/package/happy http://hackage.haskell.org/package/happy
plinkplonk 14y ago
"The idea of a compiler/language lead programmer effectively having lived in academia is terrifying on many levels." The apparent cluelessness level of this statement is so high, I am unable to decide if this is just ignorance or very sophisticated trolling. If the compiler dev working in a university or a research lab while developing the compiler is "terrifying", you should avoid C, C++, and Python, not to mention smalltalk, Pascal, Prolog, Common Lisp, Scheme, SML and OCaml .... There is always PHP. Turing Completeness FTW.
- tensor 14y ago
  It's tempting to down vote him, but at the same time this is a real sentiment that some people seem to have. Perhaps it should be grouped into the current anti-intellectual trend. Either way, it's a real problem.
  - vitalique 14y ago
    >It's tempting to down vote him Why? Ignoring the ignorance does no good. Trend you've mentioned is nothing new, sadly, but if you are on the weaker side (the one that intellectuals always tend to find themselves on), the way to win is not to try to down vote clueless guys into the light-grey invisibility, imo, but to try to explain to them what's wrong with their view of the world.

mattquiros 14y ago

This email was sent yesterday, how come it's in Courier New?