Re: [Haskell-cafe] education or experience?
Christopher Howard wrote: I'm at something of a crossroads, and I'm hoping to get a bit of free career advice. I really enjoy programming with Haskell (and a few other exotic languages), and was hoping I could eventually make a living in that sort of field. Not rich and famous, necessarily, just enough to get by comfortably. I'm trying to decide, however; should I go back to school, finish my B.S. and pursue a Masters in CompSci? Or would the time (and money) be better spent aggressively pursuing volunteer work for companies, hoping to eventually get the experience and contacts that lead to a paying job? To be honest, I don't really want to go back to school, because I learn a lot faster (and more economically) on my own. However, I'm not sure which path is the fastest, and safest, approach to an actual paycheck. Concerning a university education, there are two approaches: 1. I want to learn as much as possible 2. I want to learn just enough to get a high-paying job University is great at serving the first approach, not only because you have the freedom to skip lectures that you already know, but also because professors have a lot of interesting things to teach if you let them, and because some of your classmates will be equally interested and interesting. In other words, if you want to learn everything, then university is the right environment. On the other hand, approaching university from the second point of view usually does not justify the cost for the little benefit you obtain this way. Unfortunately, it seems to me that the tuition costs in the U.S. strongly suggest the second approach. To avoid this, I recommend to either go abroad or become very good and acquire a scholarship. Best regards, Heinrich Apfelmus -- http://apfelmus.nfshost.com ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] education or experience?
Yes... CS academics delivers less than it could/should; and whatever this delivery is, its asymptotically sub-linear. Some of it is to do with the not-quick-enough takeup of FP in academia, though there are obviously many other factors as well. http://blog.languager.org/2011/02/cs-education-is-fat-and-weak-1.html and sequel is about this: how we are not getting over the quirks of the past history of CS in present day teaching. Here too suggestions for modifications/ change of emphasis are appreciated. Rusi's cogent blog post includes a list of techniques/concepts that the unconverted could profitably pick up from the FP community. In fact the FP community came late to some of these, just as programming languages at large came late to garbage collection. Lazy evaluation--at the heart of spreadsheets since the beginning. Pattern matching--native to string processing (e.g. COMIT, SNOBOL). Appeared nearly in its present form in COGENT (1965). Booleans as first class*--surely this is a joke. Algol 60 had them. Matlab exploits them heavily (though represented as doubles). Data orientation--COBOL fostered this outlook; see Michael Jackson. As long as Lisp ruled, FP lagged on data types. FP also deserves credit for infinite data structures (though the special case of stream processing dates way back). Doug McIlroy * It's amusing to note that real Booleans--the ones that Boole used--were integers. For Boole, or(a,b) = a + b - a*b. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] education or experience?
Thanks Doug for reminding me of points that I had forgotten (and which are new) I will insert them into the blog My comments inline On Sun, Dec 9, 2012 at 10:01 PM, Doug McIlroy d...@cs.dartmouth.edu wrote: Yes... CS academics delivers less than it could/should; and whatever this delivery is, its asymptotically sub-linear. Some of it is to do with the not-quick-enough takeup of FP in academia, though there are obviously many other factors as well. http://blog.languager.org/2011/02/cs-education-is-fat-and-weak-1.html and sequel is about this: how we are not getting over the quirks of the past history of CS in present day teaching. Here too suggestions for modifications/ change of emphasis are appreciated. Rusi's cogent blog post includes a list of techniques/concepts that the unconverted could profitably pick up from the FP community. In fact the FP community came late to some of these, just as programming languages at large came late to garbage collection. Lazy evaluation--at the heart of spreadsheets since the beginning. Never thought of that -- nice! Pattern matching--native to string processing (e.g. COMIT, SNOBOL). Snobol -- yes, comit Ive heard of but dont know Appeared nearly in its present form in COGENT (1965). Hmm google gives me different cogents/ I guess you are referring to the Reynolds one? Booleans as first class*--surely this is a joke. Algol 60 had them. Not sure what you are saying (unless its about the footnote that Boole treated bools as ints! This is new to me) I was referring to the fact that C programmers have great difficulty thinking of bools as first class for similar reasons to why lists as first class is hard. [And python programmers also for that matter, whose language does not have a proper first class bool type] Matlab exploits them heavily (though represented as doubles). Not sure what you are referring to Data orientation--COBOL fostered this outlook; see Michael Jackson. Interesting! I wonder though whether you and I use 'data-orientation' in the same way? See below. As long as Lisp ruled, FP lagged on data types. A tendentious point: A lisper would say that since Lisp from the beginning had a universal data-type, it need never bother to restrict types. [Note I recollect first hearing the term data orientation from SICP] FP also deserves credit for infinite data structures (though the special case of stream processing dates way back). Doug McIlroy * It's amusing to note that real Booleans--the ones that Boole used--were integers. For Boole, or(a,b) = a + b - a*b. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe -- http://www.the-magus.in http://blog.languager.org ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] education or experience?
On Sun, Dec 9, 2012 at 11:04 PM, Malcolm Wallace malcolm.wall...@me.comwrote: On 9 Dec 2012, at 16:31, Doug McIlroy wrote: In fact the FP community came late to some of these, just as programming languages at large came late to garbage collection. Lazy evaluation--at the heart of spreadsheets since the beginning. Lazy evaluation for the lambda calculus - 1971 (Wadsworth) Lazy evaluation in a programming language - 1976 (HendersonMorris, FriedmanWise) I wouldn't call those dates late, especially since VisiCalc, the first widely-used electronic spreadsheet entered the market in 1978. Regards, Malcolm You are reading an associativity/parse to Doug's post that he probably did not intend. FP came late was meant to apply to the data orientation (I think) thanks to the long domination of Lisp ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] education or experience?
Heinrich Apfelmus apfel...@quantentunnel.de wrote: Christopher Howard wrote: Concerning a university education, there are two approaches 1. I want to learn as much as possible 2. I want to learn just enough to get a high-paying job There's actually a third approach ( and probably more): 3. I want to learn to do this job as well as possible. On the other hand, approaching university from the second point of view usually does not justify the cost for the little benefit you obtain this way. Unfortunately, it seems to me that the tuition costs in the U.S. strongly suggest the second approach. To avoid this, I recommend to either go abroad or become very good and acquire a scholarship. That really depends on the job at in question. When I was looking for entry level programming jobs, not having a degree meant you never got past the hr department. Getting a degree (pretty much any degree) was required to get the high-paying job. I'm willing to believe that's no longer the case for programmers, because academia has consistently failed to deliver sufficient quality programmers to meet industry needs. On the other hand (watching my sons deal with the job market), the litmus test for you've got what it takes to survive in the system is now a masters, not a bachelors, so maybe you're wrong about that. The other thing to consider is what your long-term goals are. Do you want to be a code monkey all your life? Or do you aspire to more? What are the requirements for that more? Getting a degree now may well avoid doing it later. Finally, with approach #3, you really need a mentor who can tell you whether or not you're doing a competent job. You're much more likely to find that in a university environment than trying to learn things by yourself. Joining an open source project might get it for you. -- Sent from my Android tablet with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my swyping. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] education or experience?
Lazy evaluation--at the heart of spreadsheets since the beginning. Never thought of that -- nice! Unfortunately it's not literally true, because spreadsheets push recalculated values to all the variables that depend on them, rather than waiting until the dependent values are needed. But the idea that sequencing is by dependency rather than by algorithmic specification is the same. I remember playing around (before spreadsheets) with the idea for Fortran-like code and concluding that the benefit of not having to specify sequence wasn't worth the effort. What a lack of imagination! Pattern matching--native to string processing (e.g. COMIT, SNOBOL). Appeared nearly in its present form in COGENT (1965). Hmm google gives me different cogents/ I guess you are referring to the Reynolds one? Yes. Booleans as first class*--surely this is a joke. Algol 60 had them. Not sure what you are saying (unless its about the footnote that Boole treated bools as ints! This is new to me) I was referring to the fact that C programmers have great difficulty thinking of bools as first class Your observation is interesting. Booleans and their utility were well known when C was designed. But since the language level was deliberately very close to real machine architecture, which rarely had native support for 1-bit quantities, the data type was deemed superfluous. (If C had begun on the IBM 7030 it probably would have have had Booleans.) I don't remember anybody predicting that the choice risked banishing Booleans from mind. The one deviation from real architecture that C did embrace was to define a representation for the result of comparison. That had another unpredicted consequence: computer architects imitated the language in hardware! (C's largely ignored bitfield capability came later and, if anything, demoted Booleans to an artifact of structs.) The joke I saw was that there was no way that Boolean values had ever been denied first-class citizenship as Strachey defined it--even if they didn't have a special syntactic identity. Matlab exploits them heavily (though represented as doubles). Not sure what you are referring to I had in mind Matlab's frequent use of a Boolean array as a characteristic function describing some property of the elements of another array. Such arrays are used to control other array operations. In this usage, the characteristic array may be optimized out of existense, but it fosters higher-level thinking and concise code. In reply to your second note, Malcolm Wallace is right. I did intend to say that FP was late with lazy evaluation. My mistake was to think VisiCalc had appeared before 1970. Similarly, I believed that call by need came into our vocabulary soon after Algol 60 brought call be name and call by value to our attention as somewhat better-behaved models than Fortran's call by reference. Now I suspect that belief is wrong, too. Doug ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] education or experience?
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] education or experience?
On 10/12/2012, at 6:34 AM, Malcolm Wallace wrote: On 9 Dec 2012, at 16:31, Doug McIlroy wrote: In fact the FP community came late to some of these, just as programming languages at large came late to garbage collection. Lazy evaluation--at the heart of spreadsheets since the beginning. Lazy evaluation for the lambda calculus - 1971 (Wadsworth) Lazy evaluation in a programming language - 1976 (HendersonMorris, FriedmanWise) Pop-2 had lazily evaluated streams about 1970. In fact that's how it did input: a 'character producer' was nothing other than a lazily evaluated list of characters. The book about it appeared in 1971. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] education or experience?
On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 5:33 AM, Doug McIlroy d...@cs.dartmouth.edu wrote: Matlab exploits them heavily (though represented as doubles). Not sure what you are referring to I had in mind Matlab's frequent use of a Boolean array as a characteristic function describing some property of the elements of another array. Such arrays are used to control other array operations. In this usage, the characteristic array may be optimized out of existense, but it fosters higher-level thinking and concise code. In which case it goes back to APL's compress operator ie 1960. http://www.aplusdev.org/APlusRefV2_8.html#HEADING179 Heres a session that demonstrates A+ Copyright (c) 1990-2008 Morgan Stanley. All rights reserved. This version is Release 4.22 a ← 1 2 3 4 5 b ← 1 0 1 1 0 b/a 1 3 4 b ← 1 0 2 1 0 b/a 1 3 3 4 -- http://www.the-magus.in http://blog.languager.org ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
[Haskell-cafe] education or experience?
I'm at something of a crossroads, and I'm hoping to get a bit of free career advice. I really enjoy programming with Haskell (and a few other exotic languages), and was hoping I could eventually make a living in that sort of field. Not rich and famous, necessarily, just enough to get by comfortably. I'm trying to decide, however; should I go back to school, finish my B.S. and pursue a Masters in CompSci? Or would the time (and money) be better spent aggressively pursuing volunteer work for companies, hoping to eventually get the experience and contacts that lead to a paying job? To be honest, I don't really want to go back to school, because I learn a lot faster (and more economically) on my own. However, I'm not sure which path is the fastest, and safest, approach to an actual paycheck. (Also, I'm something of a die-hard FOSS purist, if that affects the discussion at all.) -- frigidcode.com signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] education or experience?
* Christopher Howard christopher.how...@frigidcode.com [2012-12-08 13:26:58-0900] I'm at something of a crossroads, and I'm hoping to get a bit of free career advice. I really enjoy programming with Haskell (and a few other exotic languages), and was hoping I could eventually make a living in that sort of field. Not rich and famous, necessarily, just enough to get by comfortably. I'm trying to decide, however; should I go back to school, finish my B.S. and pursue a Masters in CompSci? Or would the time (and money) be better spent aggressively pursuing volunteer work for companies, hoping to eventually get the experience and contacts that lead to a paying job? To be honest, I don't really want to go back to school, because I learn a lot faster (and more economically) on my own. However, I'm not sure which path is the fastest, and safest, approach to an actual paycheck. (Also, I'm something of a die-hard FOSS purist, if that affects the discussion at all.) If you have some money to cover your expenses, consider learning by contributing to open source software. Compared to an academic career, you'll have a more real goal of making good software (instead of publishing papers). Also, this experience will be much more relevant for your future job. Compared to work for companies, you can choose more challenging, interesting and innovative tasks that most companies can offer. And the code quality will often be higher in open source than in companies. Roman ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] education or experience?
Roman Cheplyaka comments a post by Christopher Howard: I'm trying to decide, however; should I go back to school, finish my B.S. and pursue a Masters in CompSci? Or would the time (and money) be better spent aggressively pursuing volunteer work for companies, hoping to eventually get the experience and contacts that lead to a paying job? To be honest, I don't really want to go back to school, because I learn a lot faster (and more economically) on my own. However, I'm not sure which path is the fastest, and safest, approach to an actual paycheck. If you have some money to cover your expenses, consider learning by contributing to open source software. Compared to an academic career, you'll have a more real goal of making good software (instead of publishing papers). Also, this experience will be much more relevant for your future job. Compared to work for companies, you can choose more challenging, interesting and innovative tasks that most companies can offer. And the code quality will often be higher in open source than in companies. Roman For me, opposing experience and education is simply silly. Probably more than 70% of all people would learn much faster on their own than at school. But, learn WHAT? : 1. Probably less than 1% would guess correctly what they SHOULD learn, and 2. in general they will not be able to assess their own knowledge... Learning, for most people, is a social process. If Mr. Howard thinks that he is a kind of Srinivâsa Râmânujan, good luck, but the statistics is against him. With a chance, he will master very well one or two tools, but without a more structured background, the creativity in the domain of software might be severely limited. If a necessity of refactoring his fabulous product means more learning ab ovo, the loss of time might be considerable. Roman: - Christopher Howard seems to be very far from publishing papers; he asks us whether he should complete his B.S. In this context, recommending Open Source seems a bit premature. Jerzy Karczmarczuk ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] education or experience?
On Sun, Dec 9, 2012 at 7:04 AM, Jerzy Karczmarczuk jerzy.karczmarc...@unicaen.fr wrote: For me, opposing experience and education is simply silly. Probably more than 70% of all people would learn much faster on their own than at school. But, learn WHAT? : 1. Probably less than 1% would guess correctly what they SHOULD learn, and 2. in general they will not be able to assess their own knowledge... Very good points Haskell kneads the avant garde type-hackery stuff with classical (Hindley-Milner) functional programming very seamlessly. For the programing-pro this is a joy and a thrill. The beginner however can get completely unnerved that misplacing a bracket or forgetting an argument gives error messages involving type classes, suggestions turning on/off arcane compiler options etc etc. FWIW I have a list of points/items trying to address this issue: http://blog.languager.org/2012/10/functional-programming-lost-booty.html Please note this is work-in-progress: additions/modifications are appreciated. On Sun, Dec 9, 2012 at 4:21 AM, Roman Cheplyaka r...@ro-che.info wrote: Compared to an academic career, you'll have a more real goal of making good software (instead of publishing papers). Also, this experience will be much more relevant for your future job. Yes... CS academics delivers less than it could/should; and whatever this delivery is, its asymptotically sub-linear. Some of it is to do with the not-quick-enough takeup of FP in academia, though there are obviously many other factors as well. http://blog.languager.org/2011/02/cs-education-is-fat-and-weak-1.html and sequel is about this: how we are not getting over the quirks of the past history of CS in present day teaching. Here too suggestions for modifications/ change of emphasis are appreciated. Rusi -- http://www.the-magus.in http://blog.languager.org ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
