Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell participating in big science like CERN Hadrian...

On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 5:47 AM, Dougal Stanton wrote:

2008/10/3 Galchin, Vasili :

...

Hello,

One of my interests based on my education is "grand challenge science". Ok .. let's take the CERN Hadrian Accelerator.

Where do you think Haskell can fit into the CERN Hadrian effort currently?

Where do you think think Haskell currently is lacking and will have to be improved in order to participate in CERN Hadrian?

Is that the experiment where Picts are accelerated to just short of the speed of light in order to smash through to the Roman Empire? ;-)

I don't know what the main computational challenges are to the LHC researchers. The stuff in the press has mostly been about infrastructure --- how to store the gigabytes of data per second that they end up keeping, out of the petabytes that are produced in the first place (or something).

Well, with the LHC efforts I don't think a technology like Haskell really has a place...at least not now. Even just a few years back, when I worked on this stuff, we were still doing lots of simulation in preparation for the actual live experiment and Haskell might have been a good choice for some of the tools. All of the detector simulation was written in C++, because C++ is the new FORTRAN to physicists, and you ain't seen nothing till you've seen a jury-rigged form of lazy evaluation built into a class hierarchy in C++. Now, would the C++ based simulation have run faster than a Haskell based one? Quite possibly. On the other hand, I remember how many delays and problems were caused by the sheer complexity of the codebase. That's where a more modern programming language might have been extremely helpful.