On Fri, 28 Nov 2008 16:15:30 -0800, Don Stewart
Good work!
It is always interesting to see the secret Haskell projects that only get announced via the HCAR. Things not on haskell@ or on hackage.
For example, this under-the-radar project:
http://www.haskell.org/communities/11-2008/html/report.html#sect7.7
7.7 IVU Traffic Technologies AG Rostering Group
Haskell to solve constraints on EU bus timetables! In production use!
Speaking of production use, one type of project that would be interesting would be a study examining how Haskell can increase programmer productivity for production use for programmers who are not necessarily gifted in programming, but whose forte may lie in another field and who are very interested in functional programming; i.e., some type of tabulated data (preferably a graph, although a table would work, too) of data quantifying how useful Haskell is in allowing one whose forte may not necessarily be in programming (say, a physicist, mathematician, or even a translator who happens to have an algorithmically-focused computer science degree) to equal or excel the productivity of, say, a gifted C/C++ programmer in, say, setting up a commercial Web site. The reason is that recently, there has been news of people in academia leaving for other realms because of worsening conditions (see "As strikes begin, lecturer quits to become plumber" at http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/feb/24/lecturerspay.highereducation, and "Why I am Not a Professor OR The Decline and Fall of the British University" at http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/decline.htm). Up to know, my dream was to publish a paper on type theory to motivate study of Haskell, but now it looks like I may need to aim for creating a commercial Web site. However, I am not sure of being able to compete with commercial Web sites, because I am more of a writer/translator who happens to like functional programming than a real-life programmer. I've already seen such articles as "Why Functional Programming Matters" (see http://www.md.chalmers.se/~rjmh/Papers/whyfp.html), "Why Haskell Matters" (see http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Why_Haskell_matters), and "Beating the Averages" (see http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html). However, these essays tend to focus on how a functional language FL is structurally better than non-functional languages NFL in general, without specifying the skill-level of the programmer. Instead, it would be interesting to find the minimum skill-level s necessary for, say, somebody whose forte is not in programming, but who, say, studies functional programming as a hobby, to use Haskell as a tool in achieving a productivity level equivalent to that of a gifted C/C++ programmer. To sum: Can a theoretically-minded Haskell student who studies Haskell out of interest in type theory compete with star C/C++ programmers in developing, say, commercial Web sites? This is not quite clear, because even if Haskell can increase programmer productivity by tenfold, a star programmer can also be more productive than an average programmer by tenfold. How risky is this challenge? -- Benjamin L. Russell
-- Don
voigt:
On behalf of the many, many contributors, I am pleased to announce that the
Haskell Communities and Activities Report (15th edition, November 2008)
http://www.haskell.org/communities/
is now available from the Haskell Communities home page in PDF and HTML formats.
-- Benjamin L. Russell / DekuDekuplex at Yahoo dot com http://dekudekuplex.wordpress.com/ Translator/Interpreter / Mobile: +011 81 80-3603-6725 "Furuike ya, kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto." -- Matsuo Basho^