Re: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
I don't dismiss Haskell in business. I only maintain it's a niche market. There are some domains where the infrastructure in more established languages is minimal, and in such cases, I think Haskell can be more efficient than those languages. I should note, too, the the agile development momement over the past ten years has had and still does have exactly the same sort of attacks on it, and yet has successfully moved into the mainstream and is well-accepted by many parts of it. What has moved into mainstream is unfortunately connected chiefly to agile by virtue of the word itself. Agile means more than getting software out the door quickly, a fact many businesses have yet to learn. Regards, John A. De Goes N-Brain, Inc. The Evolution of Collaboration http://www.n-brain.net|877-376-2724 x 101 On Oct 7, 2009, at 5:49 PM, Curt Sampson wrote: On 2009-10-02 09:04 -0600 (Fri), John A. De Goes wrote: I'm not saying Haskell is unstable. I'm saying that the attitude expressed in the following quote is at odds with the needs of business: And as far as something like dealing with a changing language and libraries, the mainstream already has well-established and popular techniques for doing just: agile development. I don't know how much commercial experience you have, but I've been a founder of two companies, CTO or CEO of several businesses, a chief architect in a couple more, and consider myself as much a businessman and manager as a developer. The attitude you express is certainly common in many businesses, but it's not the only way to run a successful business. I won't go further here, since this kind of argument generally leads into a, no, what you do isn't possible kind of flamewar, but I did want to point this out here, so that others can know that, the attitude John De Goes expresses, while comon, is not the only way busineses look at the world. I should note, too, the the agile development momement over the past ten years has had and still does have exactly the same sort of attacks on it, and yet has successfully moved into the mainstream and is well-accepted by many parts of it. cjs -- Curt Sampson c...@starling-software.com+81 90 7737 2974 Functional programming in all senses of the word: http://www.starling-software.com ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
On 2009-10-02 09:04 -0600 (Fri), John A. De Goes wrote: I'm not saying Haskell is unstable. I'm saying that the attitude expressed in the following quote is at odds with the needs of business: And as far as something like dealing with a changing language and libraries, the mainstream already has well-established and popular techniques for doing just: agile development. I don't know how much commercial experience you have, but I've been a founder of two companies, CTO or CEO of several businesses, a chief architect in a couple more, and consider myself as much a businessman and manager as a developer. The attitude you express is certainly common in many businesses, but it's not the only way to run a successful business. I won't go further here, since this kind of argument generally leads into a, no, what you do isn't possible kind of flamewar, but I did want to point this out here, so that others can know that, the attitude John De Goes expresses, while comon, is not the only way busineses look at the world. I should note, too, the the agile development momement over the past ten years has had and still does have exactly the same sort of attacks on it, and yet has successfully moved into the mainstream and is well-accepted by many parts of it. cjs -- Curt Sampson c...@starling-software.com+81 90 7737 2974 Functional programming in all senses of the word: http://www.starling-software.com ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
Hi Alberto, you are working on *second order scalibility*?? Great. May I regard you a one of the first of a breed of Haskell business evangelists?? ;-)) Somebody stated here - sorry, the name's missing - the relevance of Hackage being diminuished by the great amount of *scientific* libraries, no joke... Personally, I don't think Haskell should become like Java Co. So for at least for two reasons, I see at least two reasons to speak open about what you are seemingly interested: o to support Haskell library developers to better realize the value of their work, and teams intending software projects in the non-standard areas to realize advantages of using Haskell, once they are given o to prevent conflicts, when Haskell grows economically more successful, and allowing a harmonious transition between both cultures Keep on the work ;-) Nick Alberto G. Corona wrote: This reminds me of the whole agent thing -- pretty much dominated by Java (e.g., Jade, Jason, Jack) nowadays --, for which I would bet lots things are done more straigthforward using Haskell -- especially those parts the Java coders are usually proud of... Let's maybe speak of *second order scalability*: As first order scalability would rather be a matter in space time load increased by repetitions, the concern of second order scalability would be more about a *fractal* expansion of concepts like a *closure* -- Haskell, already in a vivid exchange with interactive theorem proving (e.g. Coq adopts type classes from Haskell and dependent types vice versa) seems excellently prepared... :-) Interesting. I´m working in something like second order scalability. Instead of brute performance by redundancy, high speed networks and fast disks, scalability can be achieved by looking at the properties of the data. I ever tended to say financial applications are especially prone to be boring -- the prototype of repetitive IT, even for strategy the stupid 'traffic lights cockpits' or OLAP(!) ... But this problem is rather supply driven to me. For sure. This is supply driven. There are a lack of new ideas mainly because the technology is low level and obsolete. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
Hi Curt, in case you regard as 'mainstream' big industry projects, this is not the thing at least I am speaking about. I am speaking about small and especially medium sized projects. Frankly, I think that: o there are people among us which at some times have influence on decisions about the software platform of projects - which tend to hesitate in proposing Haskell, as they do not see an appropriate infrastructure at hand. This not necessarily needs to be the 'classical' enterprise-employee thing - the occasion to know a group of experts to be able to engage in a looser cooperation might serve well, too, etc., etc. o there are, on the other side, people among us, wanting exactly to do this... Why not let them cooperate, no matter how big it will grow in comparison to Java Co, in a way appropriate to the Haskell community? Nick ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
Hi Thomas, two very substantial contributions... :-) (a) Yes, let's do it with Happstack. (b) I just applied for the group. Nick Thomas Hartman wrote: Hey, first of all, in terms of a platform for promoting haskell commercially, happstutorial.com actually implements a job board. Yeah, it's primitive and not feature complete, but on hackage, open source, and ready for anyone who would like to work on it. (Currently maintained by creighton hogg.) This was my baby in 2008, when I was looking to foster happs for web development, as a sort of smarter ruby on rails, which I am using in the field in patch-tag.com. 2, the haskell-startup google group at http://groups.google.com/group/haskell-startup It's private, to encourage slightly more courageous business talk away from the panoptic gaze of google, but I approve pretty much anyone who doesn't want in and isn't a bot. Yes. Let's create a world with more jobs for haskell developers, and better software for everyone :) thomas. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
Hi John, IMHO, with medium sized projects which are not application software to be installed on a greater number of unknown systems, the problem described by you is less aggravating: Hackage offers a fairly good track of version history and I for myself have adapted versions a good deal of times and found it - easy, to be honest. Speaking about small and especially medium sized projects, I think agile development fits well this scope. Please do not forget this. Nick John A. De Goes wrote: On Oct 1, 2009, at 12:13 AM, Curt Sampson wrote: And as far as something like dealing with a changing language and libraries, the mainstream already has well-established and popular techniques for doing just: agile development. A project manager's worst nightmare: Sorry boss, but we're just not going to be able to meet that deadline, because, well, a language extension we were using was dropped from the language, and the syntax for some core operators was changed. Not only is our code broken, but many of the libraries we were using are broken. Don't worry, though, we're 'agile', so our unit tests will tell us when our code is working again. Big business demands stability. Regards, John ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
Hey, first of all, in terms of a platform for promoting haskell commercially, happstutorial.com actually implements a job board. Yeah, it's primitive and not feature complete, but on hackage, open source, and ready for anyone who would like to work on it. (Currently maintained by creighton hogg.) This was my baby in 2008, when I was looking to foster happs for web development, as a sort of smarter ruby on rails, which I am using in the field in patch-tag.com. 2, the haskell-startup google group at http://groups.google.com/group/haskell-startup It's private, to encourage slightly more courageous business talk away from the panoptic gaze of google, but I approve pretty much anyone who doesn't want in and isn't a bot. Yes. Let's create a world with more jobs for haskell developers, and better software for everyone :) thomas. 2009/10/1 Curt Sampson c...@starling-software.com: On 2009-09-29 13:18 +0200 (Tue), Alberto G. Corona wrote: What is the vehicle that haskell can use to enter the mainstream?. Actually, I have one more thought on that: wait. I'd had the impression that Haskell was becoming fairly well known (if not yet heavily used, in comparison to languages like Java), but I just ran across some hard evidence for this. In the 32 languages ranked on http://www.langpop.com/ , Haskell consistently comes down near the bottom in the various rankings of use. (But hey, we're not so weird we're not in there!) But if you look down near the bottom, at the chart labeled Normalized Discussion Site Results, you'll notice that Haskell comes out sixth. Even trying to be more fair to the mainstream, and changing the weighting to drop Lambda the Ultimate completely (after all, they're just a bunch of academic wankers, right?) and bring IRC down to a contribution of 0.5 instead of 1 (apparently those academic wankers have lots of time to chat online), Haskell still comes out tenth, with a score over a third that of the leader, Java, and close to half that of PHP and C (2nd and 3rd place, respectively). We've also got at least one undeniably good, production-quality compiler (which is more than PHP or Ruby can say), and have sold many tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, of books. At this point, I don't think many people (John A. De Goes excepted) are looking at people writing major applications in Haskell as if they're aliens living on another planet. Haskell is in the mainstream already as far as being taken seriously; most of the complaints I'm seeing seem to be grasping at the same kinds of straws that the anti-Java guys were back in the late '90s. (It's hopeless if it uses garbage collection.) We've even got our own over-hyped, under-utilized supposed benefit (it's good for multicore). The main whinging seems to be about libraries, of which we have only 1585 on hackage. Compare with RubyForge, which has 2059 projects in beta or better status, or 2961 if we include alpha as well. The Ruby Application Archive has 1768 projects; I have no idea how much overlap there is, or how many of these are real. I think we just need to sit tight for a couple of years. cjs -- Curt Sampson c...@starling-software.com +81 90 7737 2974 Functional programming in all senses of the word: http://www.starling-software.com ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
correction, happstutorial is now tutorial.happstack.com. 2009/10/2 Thomas Hartman tphya...@gmail.com: Hey, first of all, in terms of a platform for promoting haskell commercially, happstutorial.com actually implements a job board. Yeah, it's primitive and not feature complete, but on hackage, open source, and ready for anyone who would like to work on it. (Currently maintained by creighton hogg.) This was my baby in 2008, when I was looking to foster happs for web development, as a sort of smarter ruby on rails, which I am using in the field in patch-tag.com. 2, the haskell-startup google group at http://groups.google.com/group/haskell-startup It's private, to encourage slightly more courageous business talk away from the panoptic gaze of google, but I approve pretty much anyone who doesn't want in and isn't a bot. Yes. Let's create a world with more jobs for haskell developers, and better software for everyone :) thomas. 2009/10/1 Curt Sampson c...@starling-software.com: On 2009-09-29 13:18 +0200 (Tue), Alberto G. Corona wrote: What is the vehicle that haskell can use to enter the mainstream?. Actually, I have one more thought on that: wait. I'd had the impression that Haskell was becoming fairly well known (if not yet heavily used, in comparison to languages like Java), but I just ran across some hard evidence for this. In the 32 languages ranked on http://www.langpop.com/ , Haskell consistently comes down near the bottom in the various rankings of use. (But hey, we're not so weird we're not in there!) But if you look down near the bottom, at the chart labeled Normalized Discussion Site Results, you'll notice that Haskell comes out sixth. Even trying to be more fair to the mainstream, and changing the weighting to drop Lambda the Ultimate completely (after all, they're just a bunch of academic wankers, right?) and bring IRC down to a contribution of 0.5 instead of 1 (apparently those academic wankers have lots of time to chat online), Haskell still comes out tenth, with a score over a third that of the leader, Java, and close to half that of PHP and C (2nd and 3rd place, respectively). We've also got at least one undeniably good, production-quality compiler (which is more than PHP or Ruby can say), and have sold many tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, of books. At this point, I don't think many people (John A. De Goes excepted) are looking at people writing major applications in Haskell as if they're aliens living on another planet. Haskell is in the mainstream already as far as being taken seriously; most of the complaints I'm seeing seem to be grasping at the same kinds of straws that the anti-Java guys were back in the late '90s. (It's hopeless if it uses garbage collection.) We've even got our own over-hyped, under-utilized supposed benefit (it's good for multicore). The main whinging seems to be about libraries, of which we have only 1585 on hackage. Compare with RubyForge, which has 2059 projects in beta or better status, or 2961 if we include alpha as well. The Ruby Application Archive has 1768 projects; I have no idea how much overlap there is, or how many of these are real. I think we just need to sit tight for a couple of years. cjs -- Curt Sampson c...@starling-software.com +81 90 7737 2974 Functional programming in all senses of the word: http://www.starling-software.com ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
On Oct 1, 2009, at 12:13 AM, Curt Sampson wrote: And as far as something like dealing with a changing language and libraries, the mainstream already has well-established and popular techniques for doing just: agile development. A project manager's worst nightmare: Sorry boss, but we're just not going to be able to meet that deadline, because, well, a language extension we were using was dropped from the language, and the syntax for some core operators was changed. Not only is our code broken, but many of the libraries we were using are broken. Don't worry, though, we're 'agile', so our unit tests will tell us when our code is working again. Big business demands stability. Regards, John ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
2009/10/2 John A. De Goes j...@n-brain.net: On Oct 1, 2009, at 12:13 AM, Curt Sampson wrote: And as far as something like dealing with a changing language and libraries, the mainstream already has well-established and popular techniques for doing just: agile development. A project manager's worst nightmare: Sorry boss, but we're just not going to be able to meet that deadline, because, well, a language extension we were using was dropped from the language, and the syntax for some core operators was changed. Not only is our code broken, but many of the libraries we were using are broken. Don't worry, though, we're 'agile', so our unit tests will tell us when our code is working again. Big business demands stability. Hi, Of course, the haskell community is that immature. People keep dropping extensions without a thought for potential problems. And the package versioning policy is just a joke written for next april fools day. Sorry for the spoiler. Cheers, Thu ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
On Oct 1, 2009, at 9:56 AM, Curt Sampson wrote: The main whinging seems to be about libraries, of which we have only 1585 on hackage. It's not just about the _number_ of libraries, but the _usefulness_ of them for solving real-world problems. Haskell has a large number of libraries that are of no interest whatsoever to commercial software developers (new numerical hierarchies, category theory libraries, etc.), and is missing many key libraries that would be of great commercial value. Regards, John A. De Goes N-Brain, Inc. The Evolution of Collaboration http://www.n-brain.net|877-376-2724 x 101 ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
I'm not saying Haskell is unstable. I'm saying that the attitude expressed in the following quote is at odds with the needs of business: And as far as something like dealing with a changing language and libraries, the mainstream already has well-established and popular techniques for doing just: agile development. Regards, John A. De Goes N-Brain, Inc. The Evolution of Collaboration http://www.n-brain.net|877-376-2724 x 101 On Oct 2, 2009, at 9:03 AM, minh thu wrote: 2009/10/2 John A. De Goes j...@n-brain.net: On Oct 1, 2009, at 12:13 AM, Curt Sampson wrote: And as far as something like dealing with a changing language and libraries, the mainstream already has well-established and popular techniques for doing just: agile development. A project manager's worst nightmare: Sorry boss, but we're just not going to be able to meet that deadline, because, well, a language extension we were using was dropped from the language, and the syntax for some core operators was changed. Not only is our code broken, but many of the libraries we were using are broken. Don't worry, though, we're 'agile', so our unit tests will tell us when our code is working again. Big business demands stability. Hi, Of course, the haskell community is that immature. People keep dropping extensions without a thought for potential problems. And the package versioning policy is just a joke written for next april fools day. Sorry for the spoiler. Cheers, Thu ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
Sorry boss, but we're just not going to be able to meet that deadline, because, well, a language extension we were using was dropped from the language, and the syntax for some core operators was changed. Not only is our code broken, but many of the libraries we were using are broken. Don't worry, though, we're 'agile', so our unit tests will tell us when our code is working again. Big business demands stability. And yet they use IE... how many projects have I had to spend substantial time fixing because Microsoft releases a new IE... ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
Fairly late to the party on this discussion, but this captured my attention: On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 11:35 AM, Curt Sampson c...@starling-software.comwrote: This may be somewhat anecdotal evidence, but I disagree with both of your statements here. I've rarely known anybody to use Java cross-platform in a non-trival way, barring a few major GUI-centric projects such as Eclipse. (I've far more cross-platform use of Haskell than Java myself.) And I know of nobody who did anything serious with download-execution of Java. I agree with the download/execution part of this, but I'd be willing to bet that it is incredibly common for Java developers to write and test code in an environment very different from the actual deployment environment. With Java, it requires no special forethought to write an application on a Windows or Mac laptop, be able to run all the unit tests, etc., locally, and then deploy the production application to a Linux or Solaris or *nix server (or a combination) without any required recompilation. This is a pretty powerful selling point for the JVM as a target platform, and everywhere I've seen Java used, it's been taken advantage of. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 10:54 AM, John A. De Goes j...@n-brain.net wrote: On Oct 1, 2009, at 12:13 AM, Curt Sampson wrote: And as far as something like dealing with a changing language and libraries, the mainstream already has well-established and popular techniques for doing just: agile development. A project manager's worst nightmare: Sorry boss, but we're just not going to be able to meet that deadline, because, well, a language extension we were using was dropped from the language, and the syntax for some core operators was changed. Not only is our code broken, but many of the libraries we were using are broken. Don't worry, though, we're 'agile', so our unit tests will tell us when our code is working again. While I agree that it probably isn't the right idea to say that we are Agile, so it is safe for us to build on a foundation that is constantly shifting underneath us, this same argument came up from Credit Suisse regarding the standardization of Haskell' at ICFP 06. At the time, as I recall, they were limiting themselves to Haskell 98 + Addenda. I argued that they should be interesting in having _more_ such standardization efforts to bring into the fold more features that they can rely upon. Even so, Haskell' includes only one breaking change (dropping n+k patterns) at this time and really how often do language features get dropped from GHC? (And at the time even the n+k change was laughed at by the audience as a joke proposal, not one that anyone was serious about -- how times have changed). There have been a couple of quirky changes in how big scary types involving scoped type variables change. Otherwise it has been far more stable and consistent over the last 11 year run than any non-toy compiler that *I* can think of. Heck, think how different your C compiler is now than it was in 1999. It feels, to me that there are more breaking changes in just upgrading to, say, C99 than there have been over the entire post-Haskell 98 life of GHC. -Edward Kmett Big business demands stability. Regards, John ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
On Oct 2, 2009, at 18:46 , Edward Kmett wrote: On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 10:54 AM, John A. De Goes j...@n-brain.net wrote: On Oct 1, 2009, at 12:13 AM, Curt Sampson wrote: And as far as something like dealing with a changing language and libraries, the mainstream already has well-established and popular techniques for doing just: agile development. A project manager's worst nightmare: Sorry boss, but we're just not going to be able to meet that deadline, because, well, a language extension we were using was dropped from the language, and the syntax for some core operators was changed. Not only is our code broken, but many of the libraries we were using are broken. Don't worry, though, we're 'agile', so our unit tests will tell us when our code is working again. While I agree that it probably isn't the right idea to say that we are Agile, so it is safe for us to build on a foundation that is constantly shifting underneath us, this same argument came up from Credit Suisse regarding the standardization of Haskell' at ICFP 06. At the time, as I recall, they were limiting themselves to Haskell 98 + Addenda. I'm wondering if the referent here is to the notion that associated types will replace functional dependencies. As I understand it, it's nowhere near being possible and possibly still an area of active research. Other than that, linear implicit parameters were removed from GHC; an experimental (never standardized, or even proposed for a standard) feature that was never widely used (or used at all?). There wasn't any outcry that I recall when they went away. -- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allb...@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allb...@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon universityKF8NH PGP.sig Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
On 2009-09-29 13:18 +0200 (Tue), Alberto G. Corona wrote: What is the vehicle that haskell can use to enter the mainstream?. Actually, I have one more thought on that: wait. I'd had the impression that Haskell was becoming fairly well known (if not yet heavily used, in comparison to languages like Java), but I just ran across some hard evidence for this. In the 32 languages ranked on http://www.langpop.com/ , Haskell consistently comes down near the bottom in the various rankings of use. (But hey, we're not so weird we're not in there!) But if you look down near the bottom, at the chart labeled Normalized Discussion Site Results, you'll notice that Haskell comes out sixth. Even trying to be more fair to the mainstream, and changing the weighting to drop Lambda the Ultimate completely (after all, they're just a bunch of academic wankers, right?) and bring IRC down to a contribution of 0.5 instead of 1 (apparently those academic wankers have lots of time to chat online), Haskell still comes out tenth, with a score over a third that of the leader, Java, and close to half that of PHP and C (2nd and 3rd place, respectively). We've also got at least one undeniably good, production-quality compiler (which is more than PHP or Ruby can say), and have sold many tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, of books. At this point, I don't think many people (John A. De Goes excepted) are looking at people writing major applications in Haskell as if they're aliens living on another planet. Haskell is in the mainstream already as far as being taken seriously; most of the complaints I'm seeing seem to be grasping at the same kinds of straws that the anti-Java guys were back in the late '90s. (It's hopeless if it uses garbage collection.) We've even got our own over-hyped, under-utilized supposed benefit (it's good for multicore). The main whinging seems to be about libraries, of which we have only 1585 on hackage. Compare with RubyForge, which has 2059 projects in beta or better status, or 2961 if we include alpha as well. The Ruby Application Archive has 1768 projects; I have no idea how much overlap there is, or how many of these are real. I think we just need to sit tight for a couple of years. cjs -- Curt Sampson c...@starling-software.com+81 90 7737 2974 Functional programming in all senses of the word: http://www.starling-software.com ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: Fwd: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
On 2009-09-30 21:27 +0200 (Wed), Alberto G. Corona wrote: Do you really want, in 2020, to look back at the 2010 revision of the Haskell standard and think, we entrenched things that for a decade everybody agreed was dumb? I see no problem in haskell having both. experimental and fixed versions. Haskell 2020 for you and me and haskell 2010 for my commercial code. Both woukd ve maintained and enriched by far more people. If so, why hasn't this happened with Haskell98? Become more stupid may mean give exactly what the people want that transaltes to be more stable, give libraries, platforms etc. Not entering the mainstream seems a small price to pay to avoid this fate. Haskell has pretty nice niche right now that it's filling very well; emptying this nich to move into competition for other niches that already have languages filling them seems to me bad for everybody all around. I suspect that main hope a lot of Haskell promoters have (certainly this is mine) is not that more people do what they do now but in Haskell, but people do things in the better ways that Haskell allows. In other words, we don't want to move into the mainstream, we want the mainstream to come over here. And as far as something like dealing with a changing language and libraries, the mainstream already has well-established and popular techniques for doing just: agile development. If anything, the FP community could be learning from them on this score. So in some of your marketing ideas, you're actually marketing to a problem that has better solutions already in the mainstream. cjs -- Curt Sampson c...@starling-software.com+81 90 7737 2974 Functional programming in all senses of the word: http://www.starling-software.com ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
Curt Sampson c...@starling-software.com writes: Java is part of the Java platform, that brought OS independence and interoperability at the right time. .Download-execution on the client was also a reason for the initial success of Java in the Internet era. This may be somewhat anecdotal evidence, but I disagree with both of your statements here. I've rarely known anybody to use Java cross-platform in a non-trival way, barring a few major GUI-centric projects such as Eclipse. (I've far more cross-platform use of Haskell than Java myself.) And I know of nobody who did anything serious with download-execution of Java. Well I (dis)agree with you both :-) I think these things - running Java programs in the browser, and cross-platformness - were very important in making Java popular, even if they ended up being, at best, peripheral uses of the language. Still, they served to hype the language to an industry that had just gotten used to object orientation, and thus clearing the path for Java's adoption as a successor to C++ (where it was and is quite successful). -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Fwd: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
Curt, 2009/9/29 Curt Sampson c...@starling-software.com On 2009-09-29 13:18 +0200 (Tue), Alberto G. Corona wrote: Java is part of the Java platform, that brought OS independence and interoperability at the right time. .Download-execution on the client was also a reason for the initial success of Java in the Internet era. I was a die-hard Java hacker from 1999 until some undetermined time in the early-to-mid-2000s. (I abandoned it more or less completely sometime around late 2005, if I recall correctly.) This may be somewhat anecdotal evidence, but I disagree with both of your statements here. Of course, I´m not talking about real advantages of Java or any PL. I told about the reasons that people used at the time to introduce the language in the mainstream, either is desirable this for haskell or not. I think it is. Nobody consider the runtime download of Java code important nowadays. Not even the cross-platform features. but it was marketeed at his time as such. Rubi and Python came with libraries targeted to Rapid development of Internet applications. No, neither originally came with that. Rubi and Pyton came into existencie without their internet libraries, but they would´nt be popular without them. Although I conffess I don´t know the history in detail. What is the vehicle that haskell can use to enter the mainstream?. That may be the wrong question. Avoid success at all costs still rings true to me. A year or so ago I seemed like one of the few on the haskell-libraries list voting in favour of fixing API problems in libraries, rather than etching in stone those problems in the name of backwards compatibility so that we could become more popular. Said above. We have different goals. Do you really want, in 2020, to look back at the 2010 revision of the Haskell standard and think, we entrenched things that for a decade everybody agreed was dumb? I see no problem in haskell having both. experimental and fixed versions. Haskell 2020 for you and me and haskell 2010 for my commercial code. Both woukd ve maintained and enriched by far more people. I can tell you, even when you're a Java enthusiast, there's nothing more depressing than looking at java.util.Date and thinking, That should have been immutable, but it's going to be mutable for the rest of eternity. We will never fix that. But let's try this again: What is the vehicle that haskell can use to enter the mainstream?. Become more stupid. Is that a better answer? I'm not just a geek; I do marketing too (this is what happens when you start your own company), and if you asked me, using the utmost of my technical knowledge and marketing skills, to make Haskell popular, this is what I'd recommend. Become more stupid may mean give exactly what the people want that transaltes to be more stable, give libraries, platforms etc. That is not a extra effor. that will come naturally as more people use the language. some people is naturally more abstract. some are more practical. (I suppose it's a sign of my professionalism that to do this would nearly break my heart, but if you wanted me to tell you the best way to do this, and I couldn't tell you to get lost, that's what I'd say.) Many people will play with Haskell in the spare time, and many of them will be permitted to develop some non critical applications at work. But that is all. Hm. So I suppose that this options trading system I'm working on, which is the sole way our business makes money and is entirely written in Haskell, doesn't actually exist. Congratulations.!! I think that all the current niches are filled, but new niches are coming. Haskell already has a good niche. In fact, a brilliant one. We have a whole bunch of academics doing truly wonderful stuff (imagine the world without monads!--thank you Philip Wadler (and Eugenio Moggi)) that the rest of us (relatively) dumb idiots can use to make our lives better. We've got several very good implementations of the language, one of which is a truly shit-hot compiler[1]. And we can use that to do commercial applications quite comfortably[2]. Right. ;) My personal opinion is, yes, let's let Haskell stick to the niche where it's great, but it changes so fast that it's scary to everybody else. To echo Paul Graham, I'm extremely happy to see my competition use Java. [1] Like that's so important. Ruby's standard implementation to this day is an interpreter that implements all the popular extensions and has a reasonably decent FFI. In Haskell-land, we call that Hugs. It's only because we have GHC as well that we can look down on Hugs; in the Ruby (and Python, and PHP) worlds, they're saying that interpreters are just fine for all sorts of enterprise applications. [2] (Warning: self-promotion): http://www.starling-software.com/misc/icfp-2009-cjs.pdf Financial applications are an example of higher level programming where tasks usually
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
The cross-platform features have been extremely important to the success of Java, because they have greatly expanded the number of libraries available to developers. On Haskell Cafe, not a week goes by that Windows (and sometimes Mac) developers don't complain about not being able to use some Hackage library because of cross-platform issues. The actual number of people encountering these issues is orders of magnitude larger than the number of posts you see here. These issues impede the growth of Haskell significantly. Moreover, the importance of cross-platform libraries on the Java platform is evinced by the fact that developers of major native libraries _always_ make their libraries cross-platform (Jogl, jmonkeyengine, swt, etc.). They wouldn't go to this trouble if it weren't something the community was demanding. From a risk management perspective, a manager really likes the ability to seamlessly move across platforms and architectures without recompilation. 32 - 64? No problem. Linux - BSD? Sure, why not? Yes, I'm sure even Amazon, Yahoo, and Google make these kinds of considerations. Regards, John A. De Goes N-Brain, Inc. The Evolution of Collaboration http://www.n-brain.net|877-376-2724 x 101 On Sep 30, 2009, at 5:28 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote: Nobody consider the runtime download of Java code important nowadays. Not even the cross-platform features. but it was marketeed at his time as such. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
fwiw I found it difficult getting a Haskell installation onto Windows. Packages that would 'cabal install' just fine on Linux were much more of a pain on Windows. Eventually, I actually found it easiest to cross compile to Windows using wine: wine HaskellPlatform-2009.2.0.2-setup.exe wine cabal wine cabal install yst The resulting yst.exe seems to work fine on actual Windows machines. Quite cool I thought as I prefer to stay in Linux, but if you're starting from a Windows based development environment, Haskell does seem problematic. -Rob John A. De Goes wrote: The cross-platform features have been extremely important to the success of Java, because they have greatly expanded the number of libraries available to developers. On Haskell Cafe, not a week goes by that Windows (and sometimes Mac) developers don't complain about not being able to use some Hackage library because of cross-platform issues. The actual number of people encountering these issues is orders of magnitude larger than the number of posts you see here. These issues impede the growth of Haskell significantly. Moreover, the importance of cross-platform libraries on the Java platform is evinced by the fact that developers of major native libraries _always_ make their libraries cross-platform (Jogl, jmonkeyengine, swt, etc.). They wouldn't go to this trouble if it weren't something the community was demanding. From a risk management perspective, a manager really likes the ability to seamlessly move across platforms and architectures without recompilation. 32 - 64? No problem. Linux - BSD? Sure, why not? Yes, I'm sure even Amazon, Yahoo, and Google make these kinds of considerations. Regards, John A. De Goes N-Brain, Inc. The Evolution of Collaboration http://www.n-brain.net|877-376-2724 x 101 On Sep 30, 2009, at 5:28 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote: Nobody consider the runtime download of Java code important nowadays. Not even the cross-platform features. but it was marketeed at his time as such. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 7:54 AM, Robert Wills wrwi...@gmail.com wrote: fwiw I found it difficult getting a Haskell installation onto Windows. Packages that would 'cabal install' just fine on Linux were much more of a pain on Windows. Eventually, I actually found it easiest to cross compile to Windows using wine: The only time I have trouble with a Haskell library is when it requires some foreign library that isn't Windows friendly. HSQL and yi are two examples I remember from some time ago. However, many libraries are just fine: HDBC, lhs2tex, hlint, for example. The Haskell Platform has made this even simpler because I have a compatible base that I know will work. Justin ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Fwd: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
forwarded to the list: Curt, Rubi and Pyton came into existencie without their internet libraries, but they would´nt be popular without them. Although I conffess I don´t know the history in detail. Academics is not mainstream. 2009/9/29 Curt Sampson c...@starling-software.com On 2009-09-29 13:18 +0200 (Tue), Alberto G. Corona wrote: Java is part of the Java platform, that brought OS independence and interoperability at the right time. .Download-execution on the client was also a reason for the initial success of Java in the Internet era. I was a die-hard Java hacker from 1999 until some undetermined time in the early-to-mid-2000s. (I abandoned it more or less completely sometime around late 2005, if I recall correctly.) This may be somewhat anecdotal evidence, but I disagree with both of your statements here. Of course, I´m not talking about real advantages of Java or any PL. I told about the reasons that people used at the time to introduce the language in the mainstream, either is desirable this for haskell or not. I think it is. Nobody consider the runtime download of Java code important nowadays. Not even the cross-platform features. but it was marketeed at his time as such. Rubi and Python came with libraries targeted to Rapid development of Internet applications. No, neither originally came with that. Rubi and Pyton came into existencie without their internet libraries, but they would´nt be popular without them. Although I conffess I don´t know the history in detail. What is the vehicle that haskell can use to enter the mainstream?. That may be the wrong question. Avoid success at all costs still rings true to me. A year or so ago I seemed like one of the few on the haskell-libraries list voting in favour of fixing API problems in libraries, rather than etching in stone those problems in the name of backwards compatibility so that we could become more popular. Said above. We have different goals. Do you really want, in 2020, to look back at the 2010 revision of the Haskell standard and think, we entrenched things that for a decade everybody agreed was dumb? I see no problem in haskell having both. experimental and fixed versions. Haskell 2020 for you and me and haskell 2010 for my commercial code. Both woukd ve maintained and enriched by far more people. I can tell you, even when you're a Java enthusiast, there's nothing more depressing than looking at java.util.Date and thinking, That should have been immutable, but it's going to be mutable for the rest of eternity. We will never fix that. But let's try this again: What is the vehicle that haskell can use to enter the mainstream?. Become more stupid. Is that a better answer? I'm not just a geek; I do marketing too (this is what happens when you start your own company), and if you asked me, using the utmost of my technical knowledge and marketing skills, to make Haskell popular, this is what I'd recommend. Become more stupid may mean give exactly what the people want that transaltes to be more stable, give libraries, platforms etc. That is not a extra effor. that will come naturally as more people use the language. some people is naturally more abstract. some are more practical. (I suppose it's a sign of my professionalism that to do this would nearly break my heart, but if you wanted me to tell you the best way to do this, and I couldn't tell you to get lost, that's what I'd say.) Many people will play with Haskell in the spare time, and many of them will be permitted to develop some non critical applications at work. But that is all. Hm. So I suppose that this options trading system I'm working on, which is the sole way our business makes money and is entirely written in Haskell, doesn't actually exist. Congratulations.!! I think that all the current niches are filled, but new niches are coming. Haskell already has a good niche. In fact, a brilliant one. We have a whole bunch of academics doing truly wonderful stuff (imagine the world without monads!--thank you Philip Wadler (and Eugenio Moggi)) that the rest of us (relatively) dumb idiots can use to make our lives better. We've got several very good implementations of the language, one of which is a truly shit-hot compiler[1]. And we can use that to do commercial applications quite comfortably[2]. Right. ;) My personal opinion is, yes, let's let Haskell stick to the niche where it's great, but it changes so fast that it's scary to everybody else. To echo Paul Graham, I'm extremely happy to see my competition use Java. [1] Like that's so important. Ruby's standard implementation to this day is an interpreter that implements all the popular extensions and has a reasonably decent FFI. In Haskell-land, we call that Hugs. It's only because we have GHC as well that we can look down on Hugs; in the Ruby (and Python, and PHP) worlds, they're saying that interpreters are just fine
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
This reminds me of the whole agent thing -- pretty much dominated by Java (e.g., Jade, Jason, Jack) nowadays --, for which I would bet lots things are done more straigthforward using Haskell -- especially those parts the Java coders are usually proud of... Let's maybe speak of *second order scalability*: As first order scalability would rather be a matter in space time load increased by repetitions, the concern of second order scalability would be more about a *fractal* expansion of concepts like a *closure* -- Haskell, already in a vivid exchange with interactive theorem proving (e.g. Coq adopts type classes from Haskell and dependent types vice versa) seems excellently prepared... :-) Interesting. I´m working in something like second order scalability. Instead of brute performance by redundancy, high speed networks and fast disks, scalability can be achieved by looking at the properties of the data. I ever tended to say financial applications are especially prone to be boring -- the prototype of repetitive IT, even for strategy the stupid 'traffic lights cockpits' or OLAP(!) ... But this problem is rather supply driven to me. For sure. This is supply driven. There are a lack of new ideas mainly because the technology is low level and obsolete. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
These problems are critical -- but not hopeless, I think: (1) A simple technical matter, any average Haskell programmer (including myself...) can build a platform, e.g. in Happstack or the like, to clear this up (given you want to do this in Haskell ;-). (4) This is a special one, which I have pondered on some time ago. The customers' main concern seems to be will this company still support me in n years?? o if the project is interesting enough, I see hope there might be some academic unit willing to partake in this, as I have heard enough complaint of not having enough examples to demonstrate business relevance to students. Normally, the customer should have no problem in believing an academic unit and its interests to last some time. o I would propose to pick up the insourcing concept -- as, what I can confirm by my own teaching experiences, it sometimes is easier to introduce Haskell to beginners (once the do have sufficient OS experience) then to people who already are adherents of some other language. Ok, we might need some more introductory literature etc. (3) Yes, there seem to be lots of people organized at a smaller level than what I described -- groups of one or very few members, working on a limited time range. Yesterday, I would have written there should be remarkable interest in greater projects, but, due to the poor resonance to my mail, I feel wary to do so now. (3)(2) Such a reserved reaction might indicate many Haskellers are not motivated by the money but by the fame, and -- as the lively succJava thread shows -- what could be greater fame (besides the evaluation of 42) than stealing the Java etc. community just another attractive project? ;-)) Do I go wrong in saying there's a good deal of competitive spirit in the Haskell community interesting in taking claims away of other programming cultures which have grown saturated over the years? And, isn't the this *Haskeller bonus* indicating that doing the step to larger project should not be as hard as for others? A remaining issue might be a need for some facility to find cooperations and realize synergies -- see (1). Enough blah-blah. I got one email response (not posted to here) of a highly qualified Haskeller whom I could name two projects which might have interested him in his proximity, 80 miles and 75 miles away (and I do not have so many...). My learning is that a communication platform in this concern might be interesting to at least some of us. There are larger projects possible -- if we pick them up. All the best, Nick John A. De Goes wrote: It's very difficult to find information on: 1. How many Haskell developers are out there; 2. What a typical salary is for a Haskell developer; 3. Whether or not the skills of a typical Haskell developer scale to large applications (most Haskell developers are hobby Haskellers and have only written tiny to small Haskell apps); 4. How many shops are capable of handling Haskell development maintenance. These are the kinds of information one needs to make an informed decision about whether to introduce Haskell into the workplace. Regards, John A. De Goes N-Brain, Inc. The Evolution of Collaboration http://www.n-brain.net|877-376-2724 x 101 On Sep 28, 2009, at 7:01 AM, Jörg Roman Rudnick wrote: In the last months, I made the experience it seems difficult to find commercial Haskell developer teams to take responsibility for projects in the range of $ 10.000 - 100.000. The Industrial Haskell Group does not seem to be the appropriate place for this, while harvesting Haskell team at general market places appears to be tedious. I would be very interested in others' experiences, and inhowfar my opinion is shared that there should be a demand for such a market place, for developer teams as well as those sympathizing with introducing Haskell somewhere. Nick ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org mailto:Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
Some thoughs: Most successful languages spread because they are part of a platform which solves an IT problem. C was part of Unix, both brougth CPU independence when this was necessary. Java is part of the Java platform, that brougth OS independence and interoperability at the right time. .Download-execution on the client was also a reason for the initial success of Java in the Internet era. Javascript is part of the web browser. The .NET languages are part of NET. Rubi and Pyton came with libraries targeted to Rapid development of Internet applications. What is the vehicle that haskell can use to enter the mainstream?. I think that the mere interest of the ideas in the language is not enough. Many people will play with Haskell in the spare time, and many of them will be permitted to develop some non critical applications at work. But that is all. Java was not designed for the Internet but it was re-targeted to it because some needed features where already implemented in Java. Maybe something like that will happen to Haskell. I think that all the current niches are filled, but new niches are coming. specially with higher level programming that is made on top of current sorware software infrastructure such are BPM, workflows, more flexible scientific applicatins, creation of models in business intelligence, as part of ERPs,.Data mining too. And higuer levels of netwrok communications( for example, Google Wave robots) etc. About the last point, sometimes a basically identical infrastructure is re-engineered to a higher level, and a new language takes over. For example, the architecture of many Internet applications in the 80s was client-server based, where C, C++ was the king. This was substituted by the web architecture with Java because Java was involved in the gradual change by filling the holes of the new architecture. It could be that in a few years, instead of Web sites people could develop interoperable gadgets for aggregators such are netvibes or IGoogle or, even more radical, robots and gadgets in google Wave. Anyway, for sure, people will think and develop at a higher level. Financial applications are an example of higher level programming where tasks usually performed by humans are now automatized and there is no or few traditions about that. The need to think at a higher level without being worried by side effects and other details are specially needed in such kind of areas. That's where haskell could have its own niche. Regards 2009/9/29 Jörg Roman Rudnick joerg.rudn...@t-online.de These problems are critical -- but not hopeless, I think: (1) A simple technical matter, any average Haskell programmer (including myself...) can build a platform, e.g. in Happstack or the like, to clear this up (given you want to do this in Haskell ;-). (4) This is a special one, which I have pondered on some time ago. The customers' main concern seems to be will this company still support me in n years?? o if the project is interesting enough, I see hope there might be some academic unit willing to partake in this, as I have heard enough complaint of not having enough examples to demonstrate business relevance to students. Normally, the customer should have no problem in believing an academic unit and its interests to last some time. o I would propose to pick up the insourcing concept -- as, what I can confirm by my own teaching experiences, it sometimes is easier to introduce Haskell to beginners (once the do have sufficient OS experience) then to people who already are adherents of some other language. Ok, we might need some more introductory literature etc. (3) Yes, there seem to be lots of people organized at a smaller level than what I described -- groups of one or very few members, working on a limited time range. Yesterday, I would have written there should be remarkable interest in greater projects, but, due to the poor resonance to my mail, I feel wary to do so now. (3)(2) Such a reserved reaction might indicate many Haskellers are not motivated by the money but by the fame, and -- as the lively succJava thread shows -- what could be greater fame (besides the evaluation of 42) than stealing the Java etc. community just another attractive project? ;-)) Do I go wrong in saying there's a good deal of competitive spirit in the Haskell community interesting in taking claims away of other programming cultures which have grown saturated over the years? And, isn't the this *Haskeller bonus* indicating that doing the step to larger project should not be as hard as for others? A remaining issue might be a need for some facility to find cooperations and realize synergies -- see (1). Enough blah-blah. I got one email response (not posted to here) of a highly qualified Haskeller whom I could name two projects which might have interested him in his proximity, 80 miles and 75 miles away (and I do not have so many...). My learning is that a communication
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
If there is demand for shops to work on smaller jobs in haskell then I think a having a more specific marketplace/communication platform for haskell work would be very helpful. If there is a perceived demand, supply will soon follow. - Job On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 5:48 AM, Jörg Roman Rudnick joerg.rudn...@t-online.de wrote: These problems are critical -- but not hopeless, I think: (1) A simple technical matter, any average Haskell programmer (including myself...) can build a platform, e.g. in Happstack or the like, to clear this up (given you want to do this in Haskell ;-). (4) This is a special one, which I have pondered on some time ago. The customers' main concern seems to be will this company still support me in n years?? o if the project is interesting enough, I see hope there might be some academic unit willing to partake in this, as I have heard enough complaint of not having enough examples to demonstrate business relevance to students. Normally, the customer should have no problem in believing an academic unit and its interests to last some time. o I would propose to pick up the insourcing concept -- as, what I can confirm by my own teaching experiences, it sometimes is easier to introduce Haskell to beginners (once the do have sufficient OS experience) then to people who already are adherents of some other language. Ok, we might need some more introductory literature etc. (3) Yes, there seem to be lots of people organized at a smaller level than what I described -- groups of one or very few members, working on a limited time range. Yesterday, I would have written there should be remarkable interest in greater projects, but, due to the poor resonance to my mail, I feel wary to do so now. (3)(2) Such a reserved reaction might indicate many Haskellers are not motivated by the money but by the fame, and -- as the lively succJava thread shows -- what could be greater fame (besides the evaluation of 42) than stealing the Java etc. community just another attractive project? ;-)) Do I go wrong in saying there's a good deal of competitive spirit in the Haskell community interesting in taking claims away of other programming cultures which have grown saturated over the years? And, isn't the this *Haskeller bonus* indicating that doing the step to larger project should not be as hard as for others? A remaining issue might be a need for some facility to find cooperations and realize synergies -- see (1). Enough blah-blah. I got one email response (not posted to here) of a highly qualified Haskeller whom I could name two projects which might have interested him in his proximity, 80 miles and 75 miles away (and I do not have so many...). My learning is that a communication platform in this concern might be interesting to at least some of us. There are larger projects possible -- if we pick them up. All the best, Nick John A. De Goes wrote: It's very difficult to find information on: 1. How many Haskell developers are out there; 2. What a typical salary is for a Haskell developer; 3. Whether or not the skills of a typical Haskell developer scale to large applications (most Haskell developers are hobby Haskellers and have only written tiny to small Haskell apps); 4. How many shops are capable of handling Haskell development maintenance. These are the kinds of information one needs to make an informed decision about whether to introduce Haskell into the workplace. Regards, John A. De Goes N-Brain, Inc. The Evolution of Collaboration http://www.n-brain.net|877-376-2724 x 101 On Sep 28, 2009, at 7:01 AM, Jörg Roman Rudnick wrote: In the last months, I made the experience it seems difficult to find commercial Haskell developer teams to take responsibility for projects in the range of $ 10.000 - 100.000. The Industrial Haskell Group does not seem to be the appropriate place for this, while harvesting Haskell team at general market places appears to be tedious. I would be very interested in others' experiences, and inhowfar my opinion is shared that there should be a demand for such a market place, for developer teams as well as those sympathizing with introducing Haskell somewhere. Nick ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe -- ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing listhaskell-c...@haskell.orghttp://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
On 2009-09-29 13:18 +0200 (Tue), Alberto G. Corona wrote: Java is part of the Java platform, that brought OS independence and interoperability at the right time. .Download-execution on the client was also a reason for the initial success of Java in the Internet era. I was a die-hard Java hacker from 1999 until some undetermined time in the early-to-mid-2000s. (I abandoned it more or less completely sometime around late 2005, if I recall correctly.) This may be somewhat anecdotal evidence, but I disagree with both of your statements here. I've rarely known anybody to use Java cross-platform in a non-trival way, barring a few major GUI-centric projects such as Eclipse. (I've far more cross-platform use of Haskell than Java myself.) And I know of nobody who did anything serious with download-execution of Java. As an example, Amazon and Google are two fairly large companies that use Java extensively in their operations, and neither of them make any significant use of the cross-platform or download-execution abilities of it. They'd do just as well with a language that had a single compiler producing only Unix binaries. Rubi and Python came with libraries targeted to Rapid development of Internet applications. No, neither originally came with that. Python has never been a big language for web applications (though it's had a few outstanding successes). It has been the source of some very good ideas in the web application framework area (Django introduced some great ideas that were, at best, exceedingly rare when it came out), but those haven't really caught on. (RoR is still missing a lot of wonderful stuff from Django. Heck, even my sad Ruby web framework QWeb has more in certain respects.) Ruby on Rails arrived more than a decade after Ruby was developed, and while it's increased the popularity of the language, that's little to do with Ruby itself. RoR was well described by someone as the bastard spawn of a PHP programmer and a Web designer. I posit that it's slightly better than PHP, yet still very accessible to PHP programmers is the main reason for its popularity. What is the vehicle that haskell can use to enter the mainstream?. That may be the wrong question. Avoid success at all costs still rings true to me. A year or so ago I seemed like one of the few on the haskell-libraries list voting in favour of fixing API problems in libraries, rather than etching in stone those problems in the name of backwards compatibility so that we could become more popular. Do you really want, in 2020, to look back at the 2010 revision of the Haskell standard and think, we entrenched things that for a decade everybody agreed was dumb? I can tell you, even when you're a Java enthusiast, there's nothing more depressing than looking at java.util.Date and thinking, That should have been immutable, but it's going to be mutable for the rest of eternity. We will never fix that. But let's try this again: What is the vehicle that haskell can use to enter the mainstream?. Become more stupid. Is that a better answer? I'm not just a geek; I do marketing too (this is what happens when you start your own company), and if you asked me, using the utmost of my technical knowledge and marketing skills, to make Haskell popular, this is what I'd recommend. (I suppose it's a sign of my professionalism that to do this would nearly break my heart, but if you wanted me to tell you the best way to do this, and I couldn't tell you to get lost, that's what I'd say.) Many people will play with Haskell in the spare time, and many of them will be permitted to develop some non critical applications at work. But that is all. Hm. So I suppose that this options trading system I'm working on, which is the sole way our business makes money and is entirely written in Haskell, doesn't actually exist. I think that all the current niches are filled, but new niches are coming. Haskell already has a good niche. In fact, a brilliant one. We have a whole bunch of academics doing truly wonderful stuff (imagine the world without monads!--thank you Philip Wadler (and Eugenio Moggi)) that the rest of us (relatively) dumb idiots can use to make our lives better. We've got several very good implementations of the language, one of which is a truly shit-hot compiler[1]. And we can use that to do commercial applications quite comfortably[2]. My personal opinion is, yes, let's let Haskell stick to the niche where it's great, but it changes so fast that it's scary to everybody else. To echo Paul Graham, I'm extremely happy to see my competition use Java. [1] Like that's so important. Ruby's standard implementation to this day is an interpreter that implements all the popular extensions and has a reasonably decent FFI. In Haskell-land, we call that Hugs. It's only because we have GHC as well that we can look down on Hugs; in the Ruby (and Python, and PHP) worlds, they're saying that interpreters are just fine for all sorts of enterprise
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
Alberto G. Corona wrote: Most successful languages spread because they are part of a platform which solves an IT problem. C was part of Unix, both brougth CPU independence when this was necessary. Java is part of the Java platform, that brougth OS independence and interoperability at the right time. .Download-execution on the client was also a reason for the initial success of Java in the Internet era. Javascript is part of the web browser. The .NET languages are part of NET. Rubi and Pyton came with libraries targeted to Rapid development of Internet applications. What is the vehicle that haskell can use to enter the mainstream?. I think that the mere interest of the ideas in the language is not enough. Many people will play with Haskell in the spare time, and many of them will be permitted to develop some non critical applications at work. But that is all. Java was not designed for the Internet but it was re-targeted to it because some needed features where already implemented in Java. Maybe something like that will happen to Haskell. I think that all the current niches are filled, but new niches are coming. specially with higher level programming that is made on top of current sorware software infrastructure such are BPM, workflows, more flexible scientific applicatins, creation of models in business intelligence, as part of ERPs,.Data mining too. And higuer levels of netwrok communications( for example, Google Wave robots) etc. I see one additional driver: Once a programming language community grows saturated, its members tend to become fastidious, 'sales people' enter the scene -- look at such Java etc. programmers proud to tell how much money they are making. This impacts the goal structure, 'success' becomes more important than 'doing interesting work' -- in consequence the spectrum of engagement narrows. IMHO, many customers just aren't involved into the language issue, just wanting to get things done -- getting the better conditions, they would not hesitate to adopt Haskell. John Hudak (e.g. see his book) proposed Haskell to be appropriate for the niche of for multimedia programming -- in fact, nowadays Anygma.com (see www.nazooka.com) is active in exactly this field, some quote from their side being interesting. At least, it is quite funny that Haskell (together with Clean Mercury) after having long to struggle with exactly this issue, now can present the deepest understanding (by Monad Co.) of IO, concurrency, state stransitions and the like, so for the future, there might be a grain of truth in it. All the time, I am astound in how so few people achieve so much in producing Haskell code! Keeping in mind that there are lots of semiautomatic quality assurance techniques, for which -- though having weaknesses in IDE's and refactoring browsing (how about the Portland hackathon?) -- in some parts (e.g. QuickCheck) plays a leading role. To me, Haskell seems to have proved one very important thing: To have emancipated programming from the highly industrialized mass production process focused upon huge organization and their hierarchy pyramids (with, usually, the coder at its base). It emancipated code (== Haskell (, although not Coq)) to serve as highest level of intellectual presentation -- what I want to say is people have some joy in expressing their special knowledge in a Haskell library. I am very interested what will happen if the parcours of competition will change from massively repeated but principally simple processes (shops, business portals, communities, maybe even ERP...) to less repetitive structures -- and inhowfar non-functional programming will become a pain then -- is that what you mean? About the last point, sometimes a basically identical infrastructure is re-engineered to a higher level, and a new language takes over. For example, the architecture of many Internet applications in the 80s was client-server based, where C, C++ was the king. This was substituted by the web architecture with Java because Java was involved in the gradual change by filling the holes of the new architecture. It could be that in a few years, instead of Web sites people could develop interoperable gadgets for aggregators such are netvibes or IGoogle or, even more radical, robots and gadgets in google Wave. Anyway, for sure, people will think and develop at a higher level. Financial applications are an example of higher level programming where tasks usually performed by humans are now automatized and there is no or few traditions about that. The need to think at a higher level without being worried by side effects and other details are specially needed in such kind of areas. That's where haskell could have its own niche. This reminds me of the whole agent thing -- pretty much dominated by Java (e.g., Jade, Jason, Jack) nowadays --, for which I would bet lots things are done more straigthforward using Haskell --
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
SORRY... it's *far after midnight* here... of course: Paul Hudak: http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/hudak-paul/ ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
[Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
In the last months, I made the experience it seems difficult to find commercial Haskell developer teams to take responsibility for projects in the range of $ 10.000 - 100.000. The Industrial Haskell Group does not seem to be the appropriate place for this, while harvesting Haskell team at general market places appears to be tedious. I would be very interested in others' experiences, and inhowfar my opinion is shared that there should be a demand for such a market place, for developer teams as well as those sympathizing with introducing Haskell somewhere. Nick ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?
It's very difficult to find information on: 1. How many Haskell developers are out there; 2. What a typical salary is for a Haskell developer; 3. Whether or not the skills of a typical Haskell developer scale to large applications (most Haskell developers are hobby Haskellers and have only written tiny to small Haskell apps); 4. How many shops are capable of handling Haskell development maintenance. These are the kinds of information one needs to make an informed decision about whether to introduce Haskell into the workplace. Regards, John A. De Goes N-Brain, Inc. The Evolution of Collaboration http://www.n-brain.net|877-376-2724 x 101 On Sep 28, 2009, at 7:01 AM, Jörg Roman Rudnick wrote: In the last months, I made the experience it seems difficult to find commercial Haskell developer teams to take responsibility for projects in the range of $ 10.000 - 100.000. The Industrial Haskell Group does not seem to be the appropriate place for this, while harvesting Haskell team at general market places appears to be tedious. I would be very interested in others' experiences, and inhowfar my opinion is shared that there should be a demand for such a market place, for developer teams as well as those sympathizing with introducing Haskell somewhere. Nick ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
