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Not really - the discussion on the thread makes it sound like the kind of thing that comes up from time to time anyway. If I had to guess, I'd expect that it h
by cabacon 13y ago
Not really - the discussion on the thread makes it sound like the kind of thing that comes up from time to time anyway. If I had to guess, I'd expect that it happened based on the mission of making something that was good enough to replace matlab, and going from the matlab interface people were used to and working backwards, rather than starting from a concept of what a language ought to be like and working forwards. Given my understanding of their aim and the kinds of things I have read about Matlab at http://abandonmatlab.wordpress.com/ http://abandonmatlab.wordpress.com/, I suspect that "close enough to matlab to have people jump ship" and "first-principles CompSci" language aren't really going to intersect very hard. Given the low popularity of some of the first-principles programming languages, that may be okay?
That said, I'm encouraged to see so many people interested in it and contributing to it. My perspective, though, is that of a C/Fortran HPC person who is cheering for things that will help people move to a more scalable coding environment. I was looking at Julia to see if it was an alternative to Octave for university users; the impression I got was that it was still too subject to change to recommend at this point.
- carterschonwald 13y agohehe, then it'd interest you to know I'm working on writing HPC grade numerical tools in Haskell. I'm actually a few weeks away from doing a preview release even (terrifyingly enough). [edit: and the preview release will include some cute simple SIMD codes i've written, not the optimal ones, but a really nicely written set none the less.]
- jamesjporter 13y agoI (and I'm guessing some of the people involved with Julia) would argue that regardless of how good the numerical programming tools are, you'll never get the average working scientist to use Haskell. That sounds like an interesting project though, I've become curious lately about the prospects for integrating high performance numerical computing with functional programming.
- tikhonj 13y agoYou certainly won't if you don't try! However, here at Jane Street at least, many of the traders are picking up and using OCaml. If traders can do, so can scientists. And if it works for OCaml, it'll probably work for Haskell. (Which, honestly, is quite a bit nicer overall.) Also, the general consensus seems to be that Haskell is easier to learn if you don't already have extensive imperative programming experience. So it's also a good fit for scientists in that sense. If all the needed libraries and tools existed--many do and more will, soon--and it was easy to get up and running, Haskell would be a perfect tool. Happily, it's moving in that direction, becoming simpler and more capable.