4 ms·

This is a really shallow analysis, and I'm not claiming it's the god given truth. I've been following clojure for awhile, I've listened to--I think--all of Ric

This is a really shallow analysis, and I'm not claiming it's the god given truth. I've been following clojure for awhile, I've listened to--I think--all of Rich Hickey's talks. I've also been recently reading more and more about Haskell. I always come away feeling like they're two of the most "pure" language I've encountered. I don't mean that in a functionally pure way (though there's that too) but ideologically and vision-wise. They both just feel really clean and focussed compared to a lot of languages I use. I think I lean toward haskell right now just because I'm doing .net full time and doing .net and anything even remotely related java ecosystem at the same time would probably make me crazy. It's my own mental hangup, but there it is.

m0nastic 12y ago
Yeah, I've followed Clojure from afar for the past two years or so, but haven't yet had a reason to use it at work. I like a lot about the way the language is laid out, and whenever I watch one of Rich Hickey's talks I find myself instinctively wanting to sell all my possessions and walk the earth handing out "Data is Code, Code is Data" tracts. The few times it's seemed like Clojure might be a good fit for something small, I've ended up using Racket (for whatever reason I find all the infrastructure around writing and deploying Racket to be less cumbersome than all of Clojure's Java-ness) So far, I've written all the "collection" type stuff in my system in Haskell, and I'm glad I ignored everyone's hemming and hawing about it, because it was actually a really pleasant experience. Now that I'm gathering a lot of disparate data, I'm in the "what the hell do I do with it?" phase of my project. I'm trying to resist sucking it all into Hadoop (partly because I'm a one-person operation and even a small Hadoop cluster would be larger than all of the systems that are generating the data that I'm monitoring, and partly because I can keep about a years worth of data comfortably in memory). So I'm basically using this as an opportunity to try out whatever kinds of data analysis I think sound interesting, and then hopefully learning what is a good fit and what isn't. This is all uncharted territory for me, and I'm fortunate to be in a position where I can do what I want and don't have any time pressures. I figure I can try to use this data to learn about statistical modeling, graph analysis, and machine learning. For the time being, I'm favoring Haskell for this, but that's not really any type of requirement. I just find that I enjoy Haskell a lot right now, so I should see how far I can go before the honeymoon ends and the awfulness is revealed.
- doorhammer 12y ago
  Nice. Sometimes I feel like programming paradigms are philosophical sects and I like thinking about them more because they can be incredibly abstract but have really concrete applications. Glad to hear that you're digging haskell. The initial push into a language always has me a bit nervous, especially with something like haskell where I feel like I really need to dig in to get the feel for it. I know they say you don't need to know category theory to appreciate it, but I'm pretty interested in it anyway. I'm sort of in a similar position (except in a corporate job). I have my day to day responsibilities, but I can keep those at bay with some diligence. I also have access to lots of really interesting data (I work for a really large retailer and can access 100% of our chat transcripts, for instance). It makes me really interested in text analysis, clustering, etc, and while there are other languages that seem like they might make more sense, pragmatically, this would be a side track and I think using haskell would be more interesting for myself, especially if I end up doing most of the work on it in my spare time, as kind of a for-fun but useful project. Good luck with your data. Let me know if you decide to walk the earth talking about nonduality in programming; maybe I'll join you.

m0nastic 12y ago

Yeah, I've followed Clojure from afar for the past two years or so, but haven't yet had a reason to use it at work. I like a lot about the way the language is laid out, and whenever I watch one of Rich Hickey's talks I find myself instinctively wanting to sell all my possessions and walk the earth handing out "Data is Code, Code is Data" tracts. The few times it's seemed like Clojure might be a good fit for something small, I've ended up using Racket (for whatever reason I find all the infrastructure around writing and deploying Racket to be less cumbersome than all of Clojure's Java-ness) So far, I've written all the "collection" type stuff in my system in Haskell, and I'm glad I ignored everyone's hemming and hawing about it, because it was actually a really pleasant experience. Now that I'm gathering a lot of disparate data, I'm in the "what the hell do I do with it?" phase of my project. I'm trying to resist sucking it all into Hadoop (partly because I'm a one-person operation and even a small Hadoop cluster would be larger than all of the systems that are generating the data that I'm monitoring, and partly because I can keep about a years worth of data comfortably in memory). So I'm basically using this as an opportunity to try out whatever kinds of data analysis I think sound interesting, and then hopefully learning what is a good fit and what isn't. This is all uncharted territory for me, and I'm fortunate to be in a position where I can do what I want and don't have any time pressures. I figure I can try to use this data to learn about statistical modeling, graph analysis, and machine learning. For the time being, I'm favoring Haskell for this, but that's not really any type of requirement. I just find that I enjoy Haskell a lot right now, so I should see how far I can go before the honeymoon ends and the awfulness is revealed.

doorhammer 12y ago
Nice. Sometimes I feel like programming paradigms are philosophical sects and I like thinking about them more because they can be incredibly abstract but have really concrete applications. Glad to hear that you're digging haskell. The initial push into a language always has me a bit nervous, especially with something like haskell where I feel like I really need to dig in to get the feel for it. I know they say you don't need to know category theory to appreciate it, but I'm pretty interested in it anyway. I'm sort of in a similar position (except in a corporate job). I have my day to day responsibilities, but I can keep those at bay with some diligence. I also have access to lots of really interesting data (I work for a really large retailer and can access 100% of our chat transcripts, for instance). It makes me really interested in text analysis, clustering, etc, and while there are other languages that seem like they might make more sense, pragmatically, this would be a side track and I think using haskell would be more interesting for myself, especially if I end up doing most of the work on it in my spare time, as kind of a for-fun but useful project. Good luck with your data. Let me know if you decide to walk the earth talking about nonduality in programming; maybe I'll join you.