Re: [Haskell-cafe] Domain specific error messages

At Utrecht University we are currently tackling this problem, in the form of the DOMain Specific Type Error Diagnosis (DOMSTED) Project [1]. So at least we have one person (me) working full-time on it, plus my supervisor Jurriaan Hage, which had already worked in a similar project for Haskell 98 which produced the Helium [2] compiler. We are slowly building step towards a nice way to create domain specific error messages, and we expect to have some nice results soon :) Of course, if you have any ideas on how to improve error messages, feel free to contact me :) Alejandro. [1] http://www.cs.uu.nl/research/techreps/repo/CS-2014/2014-019.pdf [2] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/helium 2014-11-23 21:42 GMT+01:00 Wojciech Danilo :

Richard - did you think about some way of funding Haskell development? I think a lot of people are talking about low people-hours spend on GHC, but nobody ever told that a good solution here will be funding of its development. We've got so many options here - dotations, companies, vc's, community funding (maybe even kickstarter). You know, this would help MUCH Haskell and overall - everyone from this community. But in general - people are not working this way, that if somebody will tell - this is a good idea, everybody woudl do it. I'm writing exactly to you, because you are somebody very close to GHC and we all see, you "want" to do something good. Why not get funding for Haskell and GHC? I would love to help, really - as much as I can. But if everyone agree, we have to do something with it, as fast as possbile, othercase, Haskell will slowly die - taking in consideration how much moneyu is put in Scala, Go etc. These languages are getting better everyday - and of course, they've got another asusmptions than the best programming language I've been suing in my life, they have got many man-hours more spend on development than we do. What do you think?

All the best, Wojciech

Sun Nov 23 2014 at 8:42:29 PM użytkownik Artyom napisał:

On 11/23/2014 09:01 PM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:

...

It is so evident that this is THE problem of Haskell

Unfortunately, it’s not evident. Note that I’m /not/ saying it’s not “the” problem of Haskell; merely that

*

I consider myself to be somewhat intelligent

*

and – without having put much thought into this question – I don’t find it evident at all that the incomprehensibility of error messages arising when using DSLs is “probably the biggest barrier for the acceptance of Haskell on Industry”

Therefore, unless you’re sure for some reason that I’m an outlier and the majority of programmers /do/ find it evident but prefer to pretend they don’t (for pragmatic, evil, or other reasons), I would suggest writing an article attempting to persuade the community that it’s indeed a major problem – or, better yet, the problem which has the biggest utility/complexity-of-implementation ratio. I remember that what got me into Haskell was simply a handful of “mind-blowing” examples – an easily readable parser in a few lines of code, the elegance of |map| versus a |for| loop, things like that. A post with side-by-side comparisons of real-world GHC error messages arising when working with various DSLs (parsec, attoparsec, blaze, binary, diagrams, etc.) vs. mockups of improved error messages, alongside with a section describing the current research done in this direction and outlining general ideas/concepts, would probably do the trick.

​ _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe

_______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe