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
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
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
