[Haskell-cafe] Re: A rant against the blurb on the Haskell front page
Henning Thielemann wrote: Vo Minh Thu schrieb: Every once in a while, a discussion about the top-level text on Haskell.org pops in this list. Without paying much attention to this thread, and without digging the older threads, it occurs to me that different people have very different opinion on this subject. I think this is not a problem at all, because of the following thought: When someone is interested enough in a programming language to land on its homepage (i.e. haskell.org here), that someone has enough resources at her disposal to make a somewhat informed choice, and those resources can't be only a top-level text on the homepage. When thinking about What would I like to see when judging a programming language?, I found that I most like a gallery of small example programs. I started such a gallery in the style of a restaurant menu some years ago, but never got around to finishing it: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_a_la_carte Regards, Heinrich Apfelmus -- http://apfelmus.nfshost.com ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
[Haskell-cafe] Re: A rant against the blurb on the Haskell front page
Ketil Malde ketil at malde.org writes: Don Stewart dons at galois.com writes: Good start, if only the advanced were replaced with something more characteristic, like lazy, or statically typed. Which, BTW, both do not lazy and statically typed don't mean much to other people. They are buzz words that mean nothing to many people. But they /are/ defining characteristics of the language, still. I think they should be mentioned, ideally as links to separate pages (or pop-ups or a live sidebar?) that explain what they mean, and why you'd want them. -k I agree that it is important to highlight the features that are characteristic of the language. However, I would add that statically typed is a turn-off for some people, so I think it is important to add with type inference. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: A rant against the blurb on the Haskell front page
2010/10/18 DavidA polyom...@f2s.com: Ketil Malde ketil at malde.org writes: Don Stewart dons at galois.com writes: Good start, if only the advanced were replaced with something more characteristic, like lazy, or statically typed. Which, BTW, both do not lazy and statically typed don't mean much to other people. They are buzz words that mean nothing to many people. But they /are/ defining characteristics of the language, still. I think they should be mentioned, ideally as links to separate pages (or pop-ups or a live sidebar?) that explain what they mean, and why you'd want them. -k I agree that it is important to highlight the features that are characteristic of the language. However, I would add that statically typed is a turn-off for some people, so I think it is important to add with type inference. Every once in a while, a discussion about the top-level text on Haskell.org pops in this list. Without paying much attention to this thread, and without digging the older threads, it occurs to me that different people have very different opinion on this subject. I think this is not a problem at all, because of the following thought: When someone is interested enough in a programming language to land on its homepage (i.e. haskell.org here), that someone has enough resources at her disposal to make a somewhat informed choice, and those resources can't be only a top-level text on the homepage. This means if there are a few obscure words, they can digg their meaning on their own (which is quite simple: there is a search bar on the haskell.org site, some of those words are links, they are probably viewing the site through a browser that makes it easy to search through google or another search engine). I have learned a few language and I simply can't remember a single occurence where I had some interest in a language and simply decided to learn it or not based on the top level text of its community homepage. All this means a great things: if you find Haskell or learning it valuable, you can blog about it, give your personal spin to it. People interested in Haskell will find your opinion and make a more richly informed choice. Cheers, Thu ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: A rant against the blurb on the Haskell front page
Vo Minh Thu schrieb: Every once in a while, a discussion about the top-level text on Haskell.org pops in this list. Without paying much attention to this thread, and without digging the older threads, it occurs to me that different people have very different opinion on this subject. I think this is not a problem at all, because of the following thought: When someone is interested enough in a programming language to land on its homepage (i.e. haskell.org here), that someone has enough resources at her disposal to make a somewhat informed choice, and those resources can't be only a top-level text on the homepage. When thinking about What would I like to see when judging a programming language?, I found that I most like a gallery of small example programs. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
[Haskell-cafe] Re: A rant against the blurb on the Haskell front page
Good start, if only the advanced were replaced with something more characteristic, like lazy, or statically typed. Which, BTW, both do not appear in the whole blurb, even though they are *the* characteristics of Haskell, lazyness being even something that sets it apart from most other languages. AFAIK laziness is a property of the major implementations of Haskell, but not really of the language itself. All I see in the Haskell report points at it being applicative, call by name, but nowhere does the report seem to mandate a lazy strategy. It's just that being purely functional implies that the compiler is free to use laziness. Stefan ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: A rant against the blurb on the Haskell front page
On Sun, Oct 17, 2010 at 1:32 PM, Stefan Monnier monn...@iro.umontreal.ca wrote: AFAIK laziness is a property of the major implementations of Haskell, but not really of the language itself. All I see in the Haskell report points at it being applicative, call by name, but nowhere does the report seem to mandate a lazy strategy. It's just that being purely functional implies that the compiler is free to use laziness. Yes. The rumor I heard is that Haskell is non-strict: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Lazy_vs._non-strict - jeremy ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
[Haskell-cafe] Re: A rant against the blurb on the Haskell front page
Don Stewart wrote:
ben.franksen:
Haskell is an advanced purely functional programming language.
Good start, if only the advanced were replaced with something more
characteristic, like lazy, or statically typed. Which, BTW, both
do not
lazy and statically typed don't mean much to other people. They are
buzz words that mean nothing to many people.
I imagine a list of 'bullet points' following the blurb, listing the main
features with a small explanation and a link to further details.
appear in the whole blurb, even though they are *the*
characteristics of Haskell, lazyness being even something that sets
it apart from most other languages. I hear the marketeers crying
but the average visitor has no idea what lazyness means. So what?
Give them a link to the wiki with an explanation. So, a better
introductory sentence would be
- Haskell is a lazily evaluated, purely functional programming
language with a very flexible and powerful static type system.
What are the benefits of laziness?
It is difficult to explain lazy evaluation and why it helps to make programs
more concise in one sentence. But it still is *the* most distinguishing
feature.
And let us be honest: it has benefits and it also has disadvantages. The
most prominent disadvantage being that it makes reasoning about runtime
behaviour, i.e. performance, much more difficult.
Next sentence:
An open source product of more than twenty years of cutting edge
research, it allows rapid development of robust, concise, correct
software.
It is open source, and was born open source. It is the product of
research.
How can a language be open source, or rather, how can it *not* be open
source? The point of a (programming) language is that it has a published
('open') definition. Nothing prevents anyone from creating a proprietary
compiler or interpreter for Haskell, AFAIK.
I do not dispute that Haskell is a reasult of research and I agree that this
should be stated. It is still not a 'product'. Have you ever heard someone
characterising TCP/IP as a 'product'? Or HTML? Or even C? The
term 'product', as it is used in the blurb, implies or at least suggests
some specific implementation, not a written and published standard.
This really gets me every time I read it. How can anyone write such
a nonsense? Haskell is not an open source product! It is no
product at all. That most (maybe all) implementations are opens
source is certainly an interesting fact, but IMO not something that
should appear at the top of the page right under the header The
Haskell Programming Language. The second and third sentences
deliberately conflate language and implementation(s). This is a well
known falacy and I am ashamed that it
As Python, Ruby, C and every other language do.
Exactly my point. They all have only one relevant implementation. And in
practice this implementation has a great tendency to be taken as the
*definition* of the language, at least w.r.t. its semantics.
Do I really have to explain why this is bad and why specification of a
language should be clearly separate from its implementation? (Hint: how can
you ever hope to prove something about a piece of code if all the semantics
you have is whatever the implementation does?)
I *love* it that there *do* exist other implementations for Haskell, and I
dearly hope UHC, JHC etc will soon get to the point where they can be used
and recommended for practical programming.
That cutting edge research is done for Haskell as well as for its
implementations is of course good to know, but just stating it is
not nearly enough: such a statement must be corroberated with
evidence, otherwise it is just idle marketing. (Not that there
wouldn't be evidence amass, it's just that none is given.)
You literally want evidence that research played a part in Haskell, in
its opening statement? Why??
I reject this objection. I let myself get carried away here. Still I think
that further down some links can be given to papers about Haskell and its
implementation.
On we go:
With strong support for integration with other languages, built-in
concurrency and parallelism, debuggers, profilers, rich libraries
and an active community, Haskell makes it easier to produce
flexible, maintainable high-quality software.
Let us take that apart:
(1) Fact: Haskell has a good and very easy to use FFI. To the C
language. I have never heard of integration with any other langauge
being directly supported.
It is OK to contest these, but consider the FFI of our competition:
Python, Ruby, Erlang. Woeful FFIs. You are not at risk using Haskell, as
you can always call out to your favorite $language library.
You misunderstand: I *love* Haskells FFI. It is the best I have ever
[Haskell-cafe] Re: A rant against the blurb on the Haskell front page
Donn Cave wrote: Quoth Ben Franksen ben.frank...@online.de, Enough. I think I have made my point. Yes, though possibly a little overstated it. While it's easy to share your distaste for the blurb, if you take a generous attitude towards it, most of it is true enough. Sorry. I was not in a generous mood, when I wrote this yesterday night. I am more so now, and I agree that I have overstated soem points. It was not my intention to attack the people who wrote the blurb, though it may have sounded like I did. Again, sorry for that. I agree with the most of it is true enough. Certainly, but that is not my problem with it. My problem with it is how it is expressed and that it misses out on important characteristics. The implementation specific features are at least widely available to anyone who wants to use the language on the most popular computing platforms, so it's expedient, if a little cheesy, to say that Haskell supports those features. I hate this sort of expediency. And it doesn't become the front page of a language that excells in being principled. Haskell did *not* give in to expedience when it came to IO and side effects. And what would we have now it it had done so? Something far inferior and less interesting, I am sure. That said, I have no problem with mentioning the excellent properties of existing implementations, even in the first (or maybe second) paragraph. But I want the text to be explicit and honest about this. We agree about strong support for integration with other languages, but I wouldn't like to say strong support for integration with C, either. The FFI is mostly independent of C, per se - outside of the hsc macros, it just addresses a sort of platform standard for exposed library functionality, which happens to be commonly implemented in C. Someone might be able to think of a better way to put that. Yes, this is difficult to state w/o going into details. Maybe talk about 'binding to system libraries' or something like that. The point I liked best is the one you started with: This blurb should, IMO, give a concise description of what Haskell, the programming language, is, what makes it different from other languages, and why I should be interested in it. ... and, we understand, you don't find that in this blurb. Lazy and statically typed may not be universally understood, but they aren't buzz words. Whether that's the right way to shed some light on what Haskell is like, it sure says a lot more on a technical level than advanced purely functional programming language. And while that phrase is linked to a longer exposition of Functional programming, the latter is set in language-independent terms and is at best ambiguous about whether it's talking about Haskell or not. Yes, we have to be careful what we directly link to from the front page, and especially from the blurb. These documents are almost as important as the blurb itself. They should concisely explain the main features for someone unfamiliar with them, maybe contain some small examples. They definitely should be about Haskell, not something more general, and also not something more specific, like ghc, except if explicitly stated. I'm trying to picture someone who might find Haskell useful, but would be spooked by description of the language in unfamiliar technical terms. Forget Python, this is a little different proposition. A couple days ago I was talking to a friend about Haskell, turned out he hadn't heard of it. I suppose he may have found this blurb. I hope he found the blurb that appears at the top of the Introduction page: Haskell is a computer programming language. In particular, it is a polymorphically statically typed, lazy, purely functional language, quite different from most other programming languages. The language is named for Haskell Brooks Curry, whose work in mathematical logic serves as a foundation for functional languages. Haskell is based on the lambda calculus, hence the lambda we use as a logo. This most succinctly expresses the points I tried to convey to him about Haskell, and I don't think it would be out of place on the main page. Much better. Though I *do* think mentioning the main implementations and their qualities is a good thing to o, right after this: Haskell can be interpreted or compiled. It has high quality, mature implementations [link to a list of implementations], including optimizing compilers, interactive interpreters, profilers and tools for debugging, and a large and rapidly growing body of libraries [link to hackage]. The most important Haskell implementation, ghc [like to ghc page], has served as a test bed for practical application of cutting egde research into the language as well as its compilation to efficiently executable code. The text should go on and mention concurrency, parallelism, ffi, and whatnot. Cheers Ben ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list
[Haskell-cafe] Re: A rant against the blurb on the Haskell front page
Christopher Done wrote: On 16 October 2010 05:52, Ben Franksen ben.frank...@online.de wrote: what marketing idiot has written this inclonclusive mumble-jumble of buzz-words? [...] How can anyone write such a nonsense? Haskell is not an open source product! [...] I am ashamed that it appears on the front page of my favourite programming language. [...] But no, I forgot, we don't want to explain anything or even be logical, dear reader, we want to pound slogans into your head! Stand back everyone, Bill Hicks is back and he's got an axe to grind, and it looks rusty! I am sorry about the wording of these sentences, especially teh first one. I let myself get carried away. I stand by the critique, though. The blurb mixes up too many things that should be clearly separated. On 16 October 2010 07:49, Donn Cave d...@avvanta.com wrote: Haskell is a computer programming language. In particular, it is a polymorphically statically typed, lazy, purely functional language, quite different from most other programming languages. The language is named for Haskell Brooks Curry, whose work in mathematical logic serves as a foundation for functional languages. Haskell is based on the lambda calculus, hence the lambda we use as a logo. This most succinctly expresses the points I tried to convey to him about Haskell, and I don't think it would be out of place on the main page. This description is similar to Wikipedia's description of the Joy language, with samples from the blurb above spliced in: The Joy programming language is a purely functional programming language[, quite different from other programming languages.] It was produced by Manfred von Thun of La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. Joy is based on composition of functions rather than lambda calculus[, hence the composition operator we use as a logo.] These descriptions are fine, but they don't note how Haskell really is any different from other languages, like Joy. It states very clearly how Haskell is very different from Java, C, C++, Perl, Python, Ruby, etc. Distinguishing it from exotic languages like Joy is important but can be done in a later paragraph. It doesn't include the fact that Haskell is a very serious language: it has a comprehensive and stable implementation, growing community, growing and already large library set, is being used seriously in industry, is the focus of cutting edge parallelism and concurrency research, has many yearly conferences, hackathons, etc. The original blurb does mention these things. All these things should be mentioned, but not before we say what Haskell actually *is*. On 16 October 2010 09:09, Colin Paul Adams co...@colina.demon.co.uk wrote: And purely functional programming language? If they mean anything to many people, it's that the language works (i.e. functions). What language wouldn't work? I think Ben has a strong point here. To solve this ambiguity that phrase is a link that people can click to find out what it means. Object oriented, dynamically typed, stack-based are about as meaningful. The difference may be that everyone thinks he knows what 'object oriented' means. But 'lazyness', 'polymorphic type system', what the heck is that? I just think there is nothing we can do about that. These concepts are not as well known as others. We can link to an explanation and we should, but let's face it, if someone come to Haskell and expects to see only stuff he already knows about he will be disappointed, no matter how well we hide these things on the front page. Cheers Ben ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
[Haskell-cafe] Re: A rant against the blurb on the Haskell front page
Ben Franksen wrote: That cutting edge research is done for Haskell as well as for its implementations is of course good to know, but just stating it is not nearly enough: such a statement must be corroberated with evidence, otherwise it is just idle marketing. (Not that there wouldn't be evidence amass, it's just that none is given.) You literally want evidence that research played a part in Haskell, in its opening statement? Why?? I reject this objection. Oops, translation error. I wanted to say: I withdraw this objection. Cheers Ben ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: A rant against the blurb on the Haskell front page
On 10/16/10 10:48 AM, Ben Franksen wrote:
Don Stewart wrote:
It is open source, and was born open source. It is the product of
research.
How can a language be open source, or rather, how can it *not* be open
source? The point of a (programming) language is that it has a published
('open') definition. Nothing prevents anyone from creating a proprietary
compiler or interpreter for Haskell, AFAIK.
Miranda[TM] is/was a proprietary language, quite definitively so. If
nothing else, this should be apparent by the fact that every reference
to it in research papers of the era (a) included the TM sigil, and (b)
had footnotes indicating who the IP holders are. That was before my
time, but I was under the impression that Haskell was open from the
beginning ---by express intention--- in order to enable work on lazy
functional languages without being encumbered by Miranda[TM]'s closed
nature.
For that matter, until rather recently Java was very much a closed
language defined by the runtime system provided by Sun Microsystems and
not defined by the sequence of characters accepted by that system, nor
by the behavior of the system when it accepts them. Sun even went
through some trouble to try to shut out competitive development of
runtime systems such as SoyLatte, IcedTea, and the like.
Even the venerable C language has a long history of companies making
proprietary extensions to the language in order to require you to buy
their compiler, and they would most certainly pursue legal action if
someone else copied the features. This is why GCC is as big a coup for
the free/open-source movement as Linux is--- long before GCC changed its
name and focus to being a compiler collection.
The languages which are open-source are in close correspondence with the
languages which have a free/open-source implementation. There are a lot
of them, including the vast majority of recent languages. But don't be
seduced into thinking that a language is a predicate on acceptable
strings, a transducer from those strings into computer behaviors, or
that such predicates and transducers are public domain.
--
Live well,
~wren
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: A rant against the blurb on the Haskell front page
On 10/16/10 11:34 AM, Ben Franksen wrote: Christopher Done wrote: To solve this ambiguity that phrase is a link that people can click to find out what it means. Object oriented, dynamically typed, stack-based are about as meaningful. The difference may be that everyone thinks he knows what 'object oriented' means. But 'lazyness', 'polymorphic type system', what the heck is that? Now it's time for my axe grinding (though, tis a wee little axe): If polymorphism is mentioned anywhere in the intro, then it should be phrased as parametric polymorphism (perhaps with a footnote mention of GADTs). Unfortunately the term polymorphism has been co-opted by the OOP community to mean subtyping and overloading, so there will be many people who think they know what it means but will be wrong, because those are entirely different beasts than the kind of polymorphism Haskell supports. Using the more specific parametric polymorphism should at least give them pause before misinterpreting it. -- Live well, ~wren ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: A rant against the blurb on the Haskell front page
On 10/16/10 11:22 AM, Ben Franksen wrote: Much better. Though I *do* think mentioning the main implementations and their qualities is a good thing to o, right after this: [...]The most important Haskell implementation, ghc [like to ghc page], has served as a test bed for practical application of cutting egde research into the language as well as its compilation to efficiently executable code. Objection to calling GHC the most important. The most mature, most fully featured, most common, or even the standard implementation,, sure. But saying GHC is more important than the rest implies that (among others) the work on JHC and UHC is unimportant. To the contrary, I think JHC and UHC are, perhaps, more important than GHC precisely because they are treading new waters that the standard implementation cannot afford to explore. -- Live well, ~wren ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
