5 ms·

ML Family Workshop

39 points by mrry 12y ago

shassan 12y ago
website down.
jpswade 12y ago
http://archive.today/xbbhf http://archive.today/xbbhf http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jUqSHE32LSAJ:www.syslog.cl.cam.ac.uk/2014/09/05/ml-family-workshop/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jUqSHE3...
ML2014links 12y ago
link to videos (search "ML Family 2014"): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP9g4dLR7xt6KzCYntNqYcw/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP9g4dLR7xt6KzCYntNqYcw/vid... links to papers: http://okmij.org/ftp/ML/ML14.html http://okmij.org/ftp/ML/ML14.html
mhd 12y ago
Seems to me that Ocaml is really dominating this. Whatever happened to SMLNJ, MLTon and consorts?
- pjmlp 12y ago
  OCaml has industry presence and is big in Europe universities. I seldom hear about the others except on research papers.
theoh 12y ago
Disappointed that this wasn't actually a workshop for families. Cambridge used to use (still uses?) ML as a first language for CS undergrads, making its obscurity a strength (it is a new experience for most students). I see one of the abstracts talks about a "classless society" as a pun relating to object orientation. This makes me groan a bit, as there seems to be a general tendency in FP to make superficial quips, puns or observations like this while the community of FP programmers remains totally divorced from reality. A good example is the notorious video interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSmkqocn0oQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSmkqocn0oQ in which Simon Peyton Jones laments the fact that pure functional programming languages just make the CPU heat up and nothing else (i.e. they have no useful side effects.) He probably wasn't being completely ingenuous but it comes across as a lack of self-awareness: FP is all about calculation and expressions, the program is an input and the value it evaluates to is the output... That's all you can expect. You need some other paradigm to "do" things, IO monads notwithstanding. Conan Elliot has a fun blog post on the c preprocessor which dances around this issue a bit: http://conal.net/blog/posts/the-c-language-is-purely-functional http://conal.net/blog/posts/the-c-language-is-purely-functio...
- ZenoArrow 12y ago
  "A good example is the notorious video interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSmkqocn0oQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSmkqocn0oQ in which Simon Peyton Jones laments the fact that pure functional programming languages just make the CPU heat up and nothing else (i.e. they have no useful side effects.)" You're not the first person I've seen that's misunderstood this video, I can only guess at why... One thing it's probably worth remembering is that Haskell has been a research platform for many years, and some of the Haskell features that people take for granted today did not exist in earlier versions. SPJ is not saying that Haskell is useless now, but it was close to useless for creating programs for a number of years. As a case in point, try to imagine Haskell without monads. Hopefully knowing that Haskell did not have monads at one point helps you understand the historical context of this discussion.
  - theoh 12y ago
    Are you saying the video predates the IO monad? I don't think that's true. In any case, I don't think I have misunderstood: I just don't agree with his notion that a hypothetical purely functional language is "useless", as I explained.
    - kenko 12y ago
      I must have missed that explanation. What would the use of a really pure functional programming language be? One with no side-effects, not even printing to a console? (How are you going to get the answer to your computation back out?)
      - theoh 12y ago
        OK, maybe I didn't make myself clear. Basically I am just saying that a "useless" pure functional language as characterised by Peyton Jones is equivalent to a souped-up desk calculator. You type an expression in (a form of IO provided by the runtime), you press Enter, and you get a value back. This is far from useless, nothing to he ashamed of. A "classic" bit of functional programming like Hutton's solution of the Countdown problem requires nothing more. http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gmh/bib.html#countdown http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gmh/bib.html#countdown I reckon a lot of people want to use that kind of machine, though it rules out systems programming. See for example the requirements expressed in this article: http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/calculemus http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/calculemus
cheepin 12y ago
I found the Rust video pretty informative. Rust, for better or worse, is already pretty complex, but this gave a really nice high level overview of some of its more important features.

39 points by mrry 12y ago

website down.

http://archive.today/xbbhf http://archive.today/xbbhf http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jUqSHE32LSAJ:www.syslog.cl.cam.ac.uk/2014/09/05/ml-family-workshop/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jUqSHE3...

ML2014links 12y ago

link to videos (search "ML Family 2014"): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP9g4dLR7xt6KzCYntNqYcw/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP9g4dLR7xt6KzCYntNqYcw/vid... links to papers: http://okmij.org/ftp/ML/ML14.html http://okmij.org/ftp/ML/ML14.html

mhd 12y ago

Seems to me that Ocaml is really dominating this. Whatever happened to SMLNJ, MLTon and consorts?

pjmlp 12y ago
OCaml has industry presence and is big in Europe universities. I seldom hear about the others except on research papers.

theoh 12y ago

Disappointed that this wasn't actually a workshop for families. Cambridge used to use (still uses?) ML as a first language for CS undergrads, making its obscurity a strength (it is a new experience for most students). I see one of the abstracts talks about a "classless society" as a pun relating to object orientation. This makes me groan a bit, as there seems to be a general tendency in FP to make superficial quips, puns or observations like this while the community of FP programmers remains totally divorced from reality. A good example is the notorious video interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSmkqocn0oQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSmkqocn0oQ in which Simon Peyton Jones laments the fact that pure functional programming languages just make the CPU heat up and nothing else (i.e. they have no useful side effects.) He probably wasn't being completely ingenuous but it comes across as a lack of self-awareness: FP is all about calculation and expressions, the program is an input and the value it evaluates to is the output... That's all you can expect. You need some other paradigm to "do" things, IO monads notwithstanding. Conan Elliot has a fun blog post on the c preprocessor which dances around this issue a bit: http://conal.net/blog/posts/the-c-language-is-purely-functional http://conal.net/blog/posts/the-c-language-is-purely-functio...

ZenoArrow 12y ago
"A good example is the notorious video interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSmkqocn0oQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSmkqocn0oQ in which Simon Peyton Jones laments the fact that pure functional programming languages just make the CPU heat up and nothing else (i.e. they have no useful side effects.)" You're not the first person I've seen that's misunderstood this video, I can only guess at why... One thing it's probably worth remembering is that Haskell has been a research platform for many years, and some of the Haskell features that people take for granted today did not exist in earlier versions. SPJ is not saying that Haskell is useless now, but it was close to useless for creating programs for a number of years. As a case in point, try to imagine Haskell without monads. Hopefully knowing that Haskell did not have monads at one point helps you understand the historical context of this discussion.
- theoh 12y ago
  Are you saying the video predates the IO monad? I don't think that's true. In any case, I don't think I have misunderstood: I just don't agree with his notion that a hypothetical purely functional language is "useless", as I explained.
  - kenko 12y ago
    I must have missed that explanation. What would the use of a really pure functional programming language be? One with no side-effects, not even printing to a console? (How are you going to get the answer to your computation back out?)
    - theoh 12y ago
      OK, maybe I didn't make myself clear. Basically I am just saying that a "useless" pure functional language as characterised by Peyton Jones is equivalent to a souped-up desk calculator. You type an expression in (a form of IO provided by the runtime), you press Enter, and you get a value back. This is far from useless, nothing to he ashamed of. A "classic" bit of functional programming like Hutton's solution of the Countdown problem requires nothing more. http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gmh/bib.html#countdown http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gmh/bib.html#countdown I reckon a lot of people want to use that kind of machine, though it rules out systems programming. See for example the requirements expressed in this article: http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/calculemus http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/calculemus

cheepin 12y ago

I found the Rust video pretty informative. Rust, for better or worse, is already pretty complex, but this gave a really nice high level overview of some of its more important features.