6 ms·

The problem with fringe languages has always been the "all talk - no walk" nature they all seem to have. Stop telling me why you are so awesome. Just show me w

The problem with fringe languages has always been the "all talk - no walk" nature they all seem to have. Stop telling me why you are so awesome. Just show me with shipped product. Until then it's just an intellectual circle jerk. Talk less. Ship more.

wnewman 14y ago
There is truth in this. Certainly shipping more is good. But the situation is somewhat analogous to the perennial debate about commenting code, with "talk" playing the comment role and "ship[ped code]" playing the code role, so that your "talk less ship more" position becomes analogous to the perennial "code should be self-documenting" position. There is truth in that: to an important extent, well-designed code can be "self documenting" and thus speak for itself. Analogously, to an important extent, shipping code can work so well that its demonstrated excellence tells you something about the techniques that it uses, and thus it speaks for itself. However, it's hard to use that kind of speaking-for-itself effect to communicate some abstract issues , such as the issue of why something was done that way. Text explaining "here's why such-and-such [inheritance/functional/macro/declarative/whatever] techniques are important here" can be hard to replace with "look at the code". This problem can be quite severe for languages with extremely unusual paradigms, like the Haskell or Prolog examples that people have mentioned. Beyond that, many important issues only become significant in sizable programs, to the extent that they are imperceptible in examples less than a few pages. (This is not only an issue for language features: books like _Refactoring_ and _Large-Scale C++ Software Design_ are devoted to issues that become important with scale, and would probably be very hard to appreciate for someone who's never constructed or maintained a piece of software that required more than 5 hours of programmer time.) So if you get your mind around an entire application domain and a software system for it which is a good fit to an exotic programming language --- as, e.g., the HOL Light machine-checkable proof assistant seems to be a good fit to OCaml --- then you will very likely learn something about the strengths and weaknesses of the language and its paradigm. But some fraction of people, even perhaps some fraction of HN readers, will treat a software system like HOL Light as "tl;dr", so a 5-minute or 30-minute pitch on how the language fits the problem may be more effective in practice.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
tensor 14y ago
The old appeal to popularity. The only argument that is worse is the appeal to faith. An intellectual circle jerk occurs when one repeats the same old mantra without doing any actual research. There are plenty of "shipping" products in languages like Haskell. I'm no expert on Haskell, but this wasn't hard to find: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_industry http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_industry A better tagline might be: Think more and don't settle for the status quo.
- anon1385 14y ago
  That page has generated some heat in the past: http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.ch/2010/05/why-is-haskell-used-so-little-in.html http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.ch/2010/05/why-is-haskell-use... (admittedly this guy seems to have some personal grievances with people in the Haskell community) I don't know how much the page has changed since this rant was written, but some of the entries seem to be the same, e.g. 'Ansemond LLC' which is a company with a single mac app that hasn't been updated since a beta in 2009 and only mentions Haskell in an old blog post. The site for that company is so charmingly dated that I feel kind of bad for highlighting it, but if this is the kind of 'industry success story' they think worth mentioning then I'm not sure the wiki page is of any value.
  - Sssnake 14y ago
    >admittedly this guy seems to have some personal grievances with people in the Haskell community No, he's a troll. He trolled lisp, then haskell, then ocaml. 2010 fell into his haskell phase, that's the entire reason for that particular pile of bullshit.
    - anon1385 14y ago
      The thing is, there is some truth in among the bullshit. That 'Haskell in Industry' page really does have links to non existent products or long dead projects or things that don't seem to be using Haskell at all. And even after that blog post was widely circulated 2 years ago the page remains unchanged, and people are still citing it as evidence for the widespread use of Haskell in industry.

wnewman 14y ago

There is truth in this. Certainly shipping more is good. But the situation is somewhat analogous to the perennial debate about commenting code, with "talk" playing the comment role and "ship[ped code]" playing the code role, so that your "talk less ship more" position becomes analogous to the perennial "code should be self-documenting" position. There is truth in that: to an important extent, well-designed code can be "self documenting" and thus speak for itself. Analogously, to an important extent, shipping code can work so well that its demonstrated excellence tells you something about the techniques that it uses, and thus it speaks for itself. However, it's hard to use that kind of speaking-for-itself effect to communicate some abstract issues , such as the issue of why something was done that way. Text explaining "here's why such-and-such [inheritance/functional/macro/declarative/whatever] techniques are important here" can be hard to replace with "look at the code". This problem can be quite severe for languages with extremely unusual paradigms, like the Haskell or Prolog examples that people have mentioned. Beyond that, many important issues only become significant in sizable programs, to the extent that they are imperceptible in examples less than a few pages. (This is not only an issue for language features: books like _Refactoring_ and _Large-Scale C++ Software Design_ are devoted to issues that become important with scale, and would probably be very hard to appreciate for someone who's never constructed or maintained a piece of software that required more than 5 hours of programmer time.) So if you get your mind around an entire application domain and a software system for it which is a good fit to an exotic programming language --- as, e.g., the HOL Light machine-checkable proof assistant seems to be a good fit to OCaml --- then you will very likely learn something about the strengths and weaknesses of the language and its paradigm. But some fraction of people, even perhaps some fraction of HN readers, will treat a software system like HOL Light as "tl;dr", so a 5-minute or 30-minute pitch on how the language fits the problem may be more effective in practice.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

tensor 14y ago

The old appeal to popularity. The only argument that is worse is the appeal to faith. An intellectual circle jerk occurs when one repeats the same old mantra without doing any actual research. There are plenty of "shipping" products in languages like Haskell. I'm no expert on Haskell, but this wasn't hard to find: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_industry http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_industry A better tagline might be: Think more and don't settle for the status quo.

anon1385 14y ago
That page has generated some heat in the past: http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.ch/2010/05/why-is-haskell-used-so-little-in.html http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.ch/2010/05/why-is-haskell-use... (admittedly this guy seems to have some personal grievances with people in the Haskell community) I don't know how much the page has changed since this rant was written, but some of the entries seem to be the same, e.g. 'Ansemond LLC' which is a company with a single mac app that hasn't been updated since a beta in 2009 and only mentions Haskell in an old blog post. The site for that company is so charmingly dated that I feel kind of bad for highlighting it, but if this is the kind of 'industry success story' they think worth mentioning then I'm not sure the wiki page is of any value.
- Sssnake 14y ago
  >admittedly this guy seems to have some personal grievances with people in the Haskell community No, he's a troll. He trolled lisp, then haskell, then ocaml. 2010 fell into his haskell phase, that's the entire reason for that particular pile of bullshit.
  - anon1385 14y ago
    The thing is, there is some truth in among the bullshit. That 'Haskell in Industry' page really does have links to non existent products or long dead projects or things that don't seem to be using Haskell at all. And even after that blog post was widely circulated 2 years ago the page remains unchanged, and people are still citing it as evidence for the widespread use of Haskell in industry.