Re: [Haskell-cafe] Why Perl is more learnable than Haskell

2007-04-12 Thread Valery V. Vorotyntsev
Dave Feustel [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 A serious omission in Haskell tutorials is a collection of examples of how to 
 write Haskell solutions for problems that would use arrays in any imperative 
 language.
 I see that arrays can be defined in Haskell, but I don't see their use as
 computationally efficient in Haskell.

By replacing the string type with our ByteString representation,
Haskell is able to approach the speed of C, while still retaining the
elegance of the idiomatic implementation. With stream fusion enabled,
it actually beats the original C program. Only by sacrificing clarity
and explicitly manipulating mutable blocks is the C program able to
outperform Haskell.
- http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/papers/CSL06.html

The ability to fuse all common list functions allows the programmer
to write in an elegant declarative style, and still produce excellent
low level code. We can finally write the code we *want* to be able to
write without sacrificing performance!
- http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/papers/CLS07.html

Don't give up.
;-)

-vvv
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Why Perl is more learnable than Haskell

2007-04-12 Thread Udo Stenzel
kynn wrote:
 (I don't need elegant
 factorial or Fibonacci functions in my everyday work.)

I think you do.  Most of your utility programs probably fit into the
simple frame of

main = interact $ unlines . map f . lines

for suitable f.  Of course, f is hardly ever the factorial function, but
it is a function.  My guess is, you think you just wanted a loop when
in reality you need to lift a function to work over a list.


 Or I can always wait until I retire; then I'll probably have a sufficiently
 long stretch of free time in my hands

You may need patience, too.


-Udo


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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Why Perl is more learnable than Haskell

2007-04-12 Thread kynn

Hi.  I can't find that post.  Could you point it to me please?

Thanks!

kj


riccardo cagnasso wrote:
 
 The post on dons' blog about the cpu scaler is a great example on how
 haskell can easily used in the day-to-day hacking!
 
 
 2007/4/11, brad clawsie [EMAIL PROTECTED]:

 i find that don's haskell hacking blog has been written with the daily
 hacker in mind:

 http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/bloghttp://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/%7Edons/blog
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Why Perl is more learnable than Haskell

2007-04-12 Thread Alex Queiroz

Hallo,

On 4/12/07, kynn [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


Hi.  I can't find that post.  Could you point it to me please?



It's in here:
http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/blog/2007/03/10#programmable-semicolons

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Why Perl is more learnable than Haskell

2007-04-11 Thread Donald Bruce Stewart
kynnjo:
 Perhaps Haskell will never lend itself to something like a Perl one-liner,
 but still I wish that there were books on Haskell that focused on making
 Haskell useful to the learner as quickly as possible...  If such already
 exist and I've missed it, please let me know.

There's some things in the works, but for now you can perhaps find
something relevant to what you're trying to do here,

http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles

There's a good breadth of topics covered.

Also, I recommend hanging out on #haskell, you'll just see so many
interesting haskell snippets, have people to help answer questions, and
of course, the lambdabot, that you can't help but learn haskell by
osmosis!

http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/IRC_channel

Good luck. Hope to see you online.

-- Don

P.S. Have a fix point!  Control.Monad.Fix.fix ((1:) . scanl (+) 1)
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Why Perl is more learnable than Haskell

2007-04-11 Thread riccardo cagnasso

My opinion is that learnin haskell is difficult is just for the fact that
when you learn programming, you probably begin with C / C++ or some other
procedural/OO programming language, so you get used to think in these ways,
and when you have to switch to functional paradigm, you find it difficoult.

If you first language is LISP probably you find easy Haskell and difficult
pearl.

2007/4/11, kynn [EMAIL PROTECTED]:



Perl is a large, ugly, messy language filled with quirks and
eccentricities,
while Haskell is an extremely elegant language whose design is guided by a
few overriding ideas.  (Or so I'm told.)

Based on this one would think that it would be much easier to learn
Haskell
than to learn Perl, but my experience is exactly the opposite.

I've been wanting to learn Haskell for years, literally, but it has been a
case of Sisyphus and the Rock.  Despite my efforts, I never get to the
level
of expertise that would make Haskell useful to me.  (I don't need elegant
factorial or Fibonacci functions in my everyday work.)  Sooner or later
life
intervenes: big project due, long trip abroad, etc., and when I finally
return to learning Haskell, I have forgotten almost everything I learned
and
I have to start all over again.  (BTW, I've heard similar stories from
many
wannabe Haskell programmers.)

Arguably, this experience means that I have no business learning Haskell,
because it's just not relevant to my work.  Maybe so, but I still cling to
the fanciful notion that if I knew Haskell well enough, I would find
plenty
of stuff to do with it in my daily work...

Anyway, in contrast to my struggle with Haskell, I learned Perl
incrementally over the years, by using it in daily little projects,
ranging
at first from command-line snippets to 100-line self-contained scripts,
and
moving on to larger, hairier projects.  This daily reinforcement of the
little bits of Perl I was picking up was crucial to my being able to
retain
it and move forward.

Perhaps Haskell will never lend itself to something like a Perl one-liner,
but still I wish that there were books on Haskell that focused on making
Haskell useful to the learner as quickly as possible...  If such already
exist and I've missed it, please let me know.

Or I can always wait until I retire; then I'll probably have a
sufficiently
long stretch of free time in my hands (barring any operations, strokes,
heart attacks, hip fractures, etc.).  I bet I could start a Haskell
Wannabes
Club at the nursing home...

kj

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Why Perl is more learnable than Haskell

2007-04-11 Thread Mark T.B. Carroll
Sorry to hear of your struggles. There has been a lot of work lately on
writing Haskell tutorials but there's still a long way to go,
unfortunately, as I discovered when I tried recently to find the
collection of sample code fragments on the wiki that I'm sure are around
somewhere.

I had the advantage of coming to Haskell after already having used ML
and Common Lisp. But, FWIW, I found it worth persevering: I liked a lot
of my legacy Perl scripts more after I ported them to Haskell and now I
use Haskell for the sort of thing I might have used bash or perl for
previously. (For instance, on the way home last night my GPS' NMEA-0183
data was odd enough that I used Haskell to write a simple daemon that
sits between clients and my gpsd and rewrites their conversation;
previously, I'd have used Perl for that.)

Though, it helps if you get on well with Perl. It didn't suit me very
well so I had more motivation to switch than you might. But, now, by
choice, I do use Haskell for the kind of thing I'd have previously used
a short script for instead, so there might still be light at the end of
the tunnel for you.

-- Mark

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Why Perl is more learnable than Haskell

2007-04-11 Thread Thomas Hartman

I am also coming at haskell from a perl background.

While there is some truth to what you say, I do think haskell can be
used for keeping simple things simple in a way similar to perl.
Though you have to search harder since the documentation / tutorials
seem to be more optimized for making hard things possible. (And in
fact, much easier than in perl.)

But back to the easy, here is a thread concerning one liners in haskell

http://groups.google.de/group/fa.haskell/browse_thread/thread/e948ff0ad4d7c0c9/ac0a46d1f841db59?lnk=stq=haskell+one+linersrnum=1hl=en#ac0a46d1f841db59

I think if you really have desire the best route is to complement
googling around with asking on #haskell and the newsgroups. It's a
*very* friendly community.

hope this helps!

2007/4/11, kynn [EMAIL PROTECTED]:


Perl is a large, ugly, messy language filled with quirks and eccentricities,
while Haskell is an extremely elegant language whose design is guided by a
few overriding ideas.  (Or so I'm told.)

Based on this one would think that it would be much easier to learn Haskell
than to learn Perl, but my experience is exactly the opposite.

I've been wanting to learn Haskell for years, literally, but it has been a
case of Sisyphus and the Rock.  Despite my efforts, I never get to the level
of expertise that would make Haskell useful to me.  (I don't need elegant
factorial or Fibonacci functions in my everyday work.)  Sooner or later life
intervenes: big project due, long trip abroad, etc., and when I finally
return to learning Haskell, I have forgotten almost everything I learned and
I have to start all over again.  (BTW, I've heard similar stories from many
wannabe Haskell programmers.)

Arguably, this experience means that I have no business learning Haskell,
because it's just not relevant to my work.  Maybe so, but I still cling to
the fanciful notion that if I knew Haskell well enough, I would find plenty
of stuff to do with it in my daily work...

Anyway, in contrast to my struggle with Haskell, I learned Perl
incrementally over the years, by using it in daily little projects, ranging
at first from command-line snippets to 100-line self-contained scripts, and
moving on to larger, hairier projects.  This daily reinforcement of the
little bits of Perl I was picking up was crucial to my being able to retain
it and move forward.

Perhaps Haskell will never lend itself to something like a Perl one-liner,
but still I wish that there were books on Haskell that focused on making
Haskell useful to the learner as quickly as possible...  If such already
exist and I've missed it, please let me know.

Or I can always wait until I retire; then I'll probably have a sufficiently
long stretch of free time in my hands (barring any operations, strokes,
heart attacks, hip fractures, etc.).  I bet I could start a Haskell Wannabes
Club at the nursing home...

kj

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Why Perl is more learnable than Haskell

2007-04-11 Thread Dave Feustel


-Original Message-
From: Mark T.B. Carroll [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Apr 11, 2007 10:18 AM
To: kynn [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: haskell-cafe@haskell.org
Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] Why Perl is more learnable than Haskell

Sorry to hear of your struggles. There has been a lot of work lately on
writing Haskell tutorials but there's still a long way to go,
unfortunately, as I discovered when I tried recently to find the
collection of sample code fragments on the wiki that I'm sure are around
somewhere.

A serious omission in Haskell tutorials is a collection of examples of how to 
write Haskell solutions for problems that would use arrays in any imperative 
language.
I see that arrays can be defined in Haskell, but I don't see their use as
computationally efficient in Haskell.



http://RepublicBroadcasting.org - Because You CAN Handle The Truth!
http://iceagenow.com - Because Global Warming Is A Scam!


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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Why Perl is more learnable than Haskell

2007-04-11 Thread brad clawsie
On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 05:55:08AM -0700, kynn wrote:
 
 Perl is a large, ugly, messy language filled with quirks and eccentricities,
 while Haskell is an extremely elegant language whose design is guided by a
 few overriding ideas.  (Or so I'm told.)

i find that don's haskell hacking blog has been written with the daily
hacker in mind:

http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/blog

my own experience is that i would gladly replace perl for many tasks
if haskell's libraries were *easier to use*. for common and simple tasks
like reading data from a network resource (http, ftp), querying a
database, accessing xml (dom, etc), its more important to me to have
an api that is simple to use than one that takes an interesting
approach. perl's apis for these tasks tend to be very simple.

hackage seems to be on track to deliver the advantages of the cpan
tool and repository, so in that sense i think one of the key
advantages of perl has been adopted by the haskell community.

both languages have great communities!
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Why Perl is more learnable than Haskell

2007-04-11 Thread riccardo cagnasso

The post on dons' blog about the cpu scaler is a great example on how
haskell can easily used in the day-to-day hacking!


2007/4/11, brad clawsie [EMAIL PROTECTED]:


i find that don's haskell hacking blog has been written with the daily
hacker in mind:

http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/bloghttp://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/%7Edons/blog
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Why Perl is more learnable than Haskell

2007-04-11 Thread Alex Queiroz

Hallo,

On 4/11/07, riccardo cagnasso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

The post on dons' blog about the cpu scaler is a great example on how
haskell can easily used in the day-to-day hacking!



Just read it, it's a very nice post. I'm not afraid of math, but
it's a relief to see some code I can relate with. :-)

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Why Perl is more learnable than Haskell

2007-04-11 Thread John Velman
On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 05:55:08AM -0700, kynn wrote:
 
 Perl is a large, ugly, messy language filled with quirks and eccentricities,
 while Haskell is an extremely elegant language whose design is guided by a
 few overriding ideas.  (Or so I'm told.)
 
 Based on this one would think that it would be much easier to learn Haskell
 than to learn Perl, but my experience is exactly the opposite.
 Haskell useful to the learner as quickly as possible...  If such already
snip

 exist and I've missed it, please let me know.
 
 Or I can always wait until I retire; then I'll probably have a sufficiently
 long stretch of free time in my hands (barring any operations, strokes,
 heart attacks, hip fractures, etc.).  I bet I could start a Haskell Wannabes
 Club at the nursing home...
 
 kj

My experience is a lot like yours, except I retired 5 years ago, and still
haven't learned Haskell.  Unfortunately, I've had lots of interruptions
that have kept me away from the keyboard.  I've got a few unfinished
projects, including one I started in Perl years ago, moved to Python, then
moved to Haskell.  The only useful thing I've programmed since I retired
was a program to update my checkbook/bank statement postgresql database
using Prolog for parsing entries the way I like to write them in a text
file.  Someday I'll move this to Haskell :-).  I've sworn off other
languages since I don't have any deadlines except my own.

I never really learned Perl, but I used it a lot for simple one to thirty
liners.  The thing was, any thing I wanted to do I could find the bits and
pieces of in Learning Perl, Programming Perl, or Learning Perl/TK.

I have on my shelf Haskell: The craft..., The Haskell school of
expression, and The Haskell road to Logic  I've read them.  I know
I should sit down with each one at the computer and work through the
exercises.  But..,.

When my current spate of unavoidable interruptions is over, I'll look into
the email on Haskell one-liners, and some of the new tutorials to try to
come back up to speed.  Not in a nursing home yet!

Good luck,

John Velman
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Why Perl is more learnable than Haskell

2007-04-11 Thread David Tolpin


If you first language is LISP probably you find easy Haskell and difficult
pearl.




Hi,

my first programming language is lisp (that is, the language I am most
fluent in -- recently Common Lisp, earlier Scheme) and I find Haskell a
problematic programming language (this is a fresh experience -- I am writing
a syndrome-networks based DSS in Haskell now) because it is not a language.
Lisp is a language and Haskell is not, in the sense that lisp allows to
write programs that can be read aloud and understood from reading the code.

Haskell is a notation that is not a literature by itself, and for Haskell,
literate programming, that is, writing more comments than code, is a must;
while for lisp it is a rather exotic practice.

David
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Why Perl is more learnable than Haskell

2007-04-11 Thread jim burton



kynn wrote:
 
 Perl is a large, ugly, messy language filled with quirks and
 eccentricities, while Haskell is an extremely elegant language whose
 design is guided by a few overriding ideas.  (Or so I'm told.)
 
 [snip]
 
 
May I ask why you want to learn it so much, if you find it so hard? I'm sure
most would disagree with me but maybe you'd be better off with perl for your
one liners and scripts if it serves your purpose well. You say that you've
heard Haskell is extremely elegant, but is that really the reason you want
to start using it as your general purpose and scripting language? I'm also
interested in it myself because of it's elegance, and in order to learn
different paradigms, to explore the strength of the type system etc etc, but
I'm not in a particular rush to be able to use it as the one true language
for scripting or web applications, or xyz, as quite a few people lately seem
to be asking about. Just curious.
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Why Perl is more learnable than Haskell

2007-04-11 Thread Brandon Michael Moore
On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 02:21:41PM +0100, Will Newton wrote:
 On 4/11/07, kynn [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 
 Perl is a large, ugly, messy language filled with quirks and 
 eccentricities,
 while Haskell is an extremely elegant language whose design is guided by a
 few overriding ideas.  (Or so I'm told.)
 
 Based on this one would think that it would be much easier to learn Haskell
 than to learn Perl, but my experience is exactly the opposite.
 
 I've been trying to learn Haskell for some time also, and I've learnt
 lots of various other languages in the past. I think one of the
 biggest problems is if there is a considerable learning curve, which
 Haskell undoubtedly has, there's a nagging question in the back of
 your head while you try and get a simple task accomplished in an
 unfamiliar language - why am I bothering with this, I could do it in
 5 minutes in Perl/Python/Ruby/...!.
 
 And for many simple tasks Perl is a really good fit - it's best to
 find a task that plays to Haskell's strengths so you get a bit of
 positive reinforcement while you work. I have been working with Parsec
 to do some parsing recently and I can definitely recommend it. I don't
 think I've used such a capable and easy to use parsing framework in
 any language and it's really kept me going with Haskell where I might
 have just done it in Python in the past.

Writing interpreters is one task where Haskell is really nice.
I suggest Unlambda, it makes a nice toy language. The syntax
is easy to work with, and continuations make the semantics
interesting enough that you can't just rely on the host language
acting the same way, like you generally can with mutable state,
sequential evaluation and so on (unless you're using something
like scheme or ml, but then you probably wouldn't have trouble
with Haskell).

Brandon
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Why Perl is more learnable than Haskell

2007-04-11 Thread David Tolpin

Hi,

I'm guessing you're not doing it the right way.


cvs -d :pserver:[EMAIL PROTECTED]:/srv/CVSROOT co SYRENE/src




By using types, you implementation becomes a lot more readable.



Being readable is not enough for being readable aloud.

And I think a lot of people here will disagree with you...



That's good news.  I would not bother to express my option if I thought that
there would not be a lot of people who would disagree.

David
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Why Perl is more learnable than Haskell

2007-04-11 Thread Tomasz Zielonka
On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 05:55:08AM -0700, kynn wrote:
 Perl is a large, ugly, messy language filled with quirks and eccentricities,
 while Haskell is an extremely elegant language whose design is guided by a
 few overriding ideas.  (Or so I'm told.)
 
 Based on this one would think that it would be much easier to learn Haskell
 than to learn Perl, but my experience is exactly the opposite.

Perhaps it's just that being more elegant doesn't make it easier to
learn. There are almost no overriding ideas in SKI combinator calculus,
but I wouldn't say it's a nice and easy programming language (Well, OK,
I didn't try to master it, so maybe I'm wrong).

The biggest problem with Haskell is that not only you can do things
differently (than in other languages) - you have to! Also, some tasks
are only easy when you know some advanced programming techniques, like
parsing with parser combinators. There is also the problem that
fundamental concepts are quite entangled, and it's difficult to choose
the starting point when learning or teaching.

The language also seems a bit schizophrenic. For example, you can say
that it has side-effects and that it has no side-effects, and both
statements are true in some sense (expression evaluation has no
side-effects but there are features like IO, mutable arrays, etc. - it's
quite difficult to explain to beginners why there is no contradiction,
or where is the trick, in other words).

Actually, I don't know which is the biggest problem... and there are
more of them.

Best regards
Tomasz
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Why Perl is more learnable than Haskell

2007-04-11 Thread Thomas Conway

On 4/11/07, riccardo cagnasso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

If you first language is LISP probably you find easy Haskell and difficult
pearl.


I must say I agree here. I spent 10 years programming in prolog before
I tried haskell. Most of my problems with haskell are because it has a
rather opaque performance model (e.g. when should you use tail
recursion, and when should you not). But I happily acknowledge that my
experience is probably atypical. ;-)

cheers,
T.
--
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[EMAIL PROTECTED] for you cannot eat your beauty.
 -- Congo proverb
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Why Perl is more learnable than Haskell

2007-04-11 Thread kynn


riccardo cagnasso wrote:
 
 My opinion is that learnin haskell is difficult is just for the fact
 that
 when you learn programming, you probably begin with C / C++ or some other
 procedural/OO programming language...
 

Actually, my first language was Scheme; I loved it, and I aced the class,
but that was many years ago, and I never had to code real world
applications with Scheme.  My problems with Haskell are not conceptual, but
rather pragmatic.  I have not been able to find enough support in Haskell
for everyday tasks (e.g. read a stream from a socket; parse it into a simple
data structure; process the data in the structure; print out the results to
a socket; etc.), and unless I want to code large low-level libraries from
scratch just to get conceptually simple tasks done, I can't afford to use
Haskell (any more than I could afford to use barebones C, for that matter).

And even though my interest in learning Haskell is not a pragmatic one
(I'm quite productive with the tools I know; I just want to learn a new way
to program, by way of intellectual curiosity), my life is such that, unless
I can immediately make use of the language I'm attempting to learn, it just
won't stick!  The language needs it to be useful not because I need a tool,
but because unless it is useful my brain just won't absorb it!

kj

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Why Perl is more learnable than Haskell

2007-04-11 Thread Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH


On Apr 11, 2007, at 23:10 , kynn wrote:
rather pragmatic.  I have not been able to find enough support in  
Haskell
for everyday tasks (e.g. read a stream from a socket; parse it into  
a simple


The stuff in Network (not Network.Socket) gives you a Handle, which  
you can treat more or less like any other Haskell Handle  
(filehandle).  Network.Socket should be reserved for when you need to  
work at a really low level.


--
brandon s. allbery  [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell]   
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
system administrator  [openafs,heimdal,too many hats]   
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university   
KF8NH



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