Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell-Cafe Digest, Vol 217, Issue 16

Haskell's big problem right now is adoption.

I'm not quite sure this is a problem. Haskell and its libraries are designed around math concepts, as opposed to CS concepts (semigroup vs IConcatenable). Learning it all but requires learning some algebra as well, thus a lower adoption rate is expected. Personally, I consider this math requirement a great educational benefit: raising the level of abstraction from "container" to "monoid" helps to make better design decisions. It may be an obstacle for someone who wants quickly put together a new product, but this is the wrong tool selected for a job. A book like "Category theory for programmers" (that exists) and "Algebra for programmers" (that I don't know about) may help with learning and provide practical examples, but explaining math without using math words sounds like a futile attempt. On Fri, Sep 17, 2021 at 12:58 AM Michael Turner < michael.eugene.turner@gmail.com> wrote:

"The seeds of your confusion are very evident from your message".

The seeds of your unsubstantiated assumptions about me are very evident from yours.

"You can't just 'translate' an algorithm from OOP to Haskell"

Wow, I'm either "trying to translate Haskell to C++" (someone else, above) or trying to translate C++ to Haskell.

I'm actually doing neither. I started by trying to understand this:

https://www.stwing.upenn.edu/~wlovas/hudak/aug.pdf

(And no, just because Haskell is great for writing little special-purpose programming languages does not automatically mean it's up to snuff for handling natural language.)

I'd originally hoped to fully understand the rather short program in that paper (full code, in two versions, elsewhere on Paul Jones aca dite) by getting it to run again, then commenting the code as I began to understand it. And then, on to more important issues for a fuller Haskell implementation, issues described here

https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/C94-2137.pdf

and here

http://www.lacus.org/volumes/23/22.sypniewski.pdf

Both of which are references I dug up and supplied here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applicative_universal_grammar

as I took the Wikipedia article from stub status to something less stubby -- it actually started in this state:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Applicative_universal_grammar&diff=prev&oldid=1020447173

The ASCII-art diagrams you see there are output from code that I've gotten working again.

I learned about lazy evaluation in college, when I got interested in how Lisp might implement it. I'm very familiar with the arguments for purity, especially from learning Erlang some years ago (during which I wrote my share of accumulator-based tail-recursive functions.) I prefer static typing but hated the way C++ templates extended the concept, mostly because the syntax error messages were so bad for so long. My career includes a time in the late 80s when the kind of computing power we have in our phones now with multicore processors filled a box of hardware too heavy to lift. This was at a startup where the founder was substantially inspired by this stream-oriented single-assignment language:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SISAL

I started programming at 15. It's been a very rare year, even after leaving the software profession, when I didn't write at least some code, learning new things in the process. Which means I've been looking at programming languages and how to implement things at the most appropriate level of abstraction possible for just a few months shy of fifty years.

The arguments here are following a familiar pattern, one I see in discussions of everything from programming to government policy.

(1) I disagree with someone (2) This person instantly assumes I must be ignorant of what they know (3) They start Mansplaining It All To Me.

This is particularly irksome when the person is actually considerably more ignorant of the subject than I am.

I'm still ignorant of most of Haskell, to be sure. However, I'm not ignorant when it comes to writing. (Published articles on request.) A great deal of what's written about Haskell, usually with very good intentions, has proved useless to me. Have I had a stroke that leaves me apparently unharmed, but actually no longer able to absorb a different programming language? Was I always just too dumb to learn Haskell? Somehow, I think it's more related to the writing.

To some extent the community seems to recognize there's a problem -- e.g., the Monad Tutorial Explosion. I finally got (most of?) what monads really mean for practical programming when none other than Simon Peyton-Jones said F# called a very similar construct "workflow," a word he likes. Wow, plain English instead of a mathematical abstraction that, in the math introductions, looks weirdly clunky to me, if anything, but, in any case, very hard to relate to writing better code.

Lambda calculus? I have vague memories of Eugene Lawler

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Lawler

covering it when I took computing theory from him. And again, when I was grading computing theory homework for this required course for graduate students (for their prelim exams) for Richard Lipton

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lipton

in the fall term of 1980 at U.C. Berkeley.

It's not that I'm too stupid to learn lambda calculus. It's that I seriously doubt that refreshing my memory on the details is going to add significantly more to my grasp of functional programming in Haskell.

I disagree with some people here. They jump to the conclusion that I'm some ignorant moron. They also keep trying to sell Haskell as something dramatically, fundamentally -- nay transcendentally! -- different from anything I've ever known.

Are you doing that? Stop. Just stop. Haskell's big problem right now is adoption. And I'm telling you why adoption has been hard for me. You lecture back, telling me things I already know, making sweeping assumptions about me. When you do that, you're not part of the solution to Haskell's biggest problem right now. You're part of the problem.

Regards, Michael Turner Executive Director Project Persephone 1-25-33 Takadanobaba Shinjuku-ku Tokyo 169-0075 Mobile: +81 (90) 5203-8682 turner@projectpersephone.org

Understand - http://www.projectpersephone.org/ Join - http://www.facebook.com/groups/ProjectPersephone/ Donate - http://www.patreon.com/ProjectPersephone Volunteer - https://github.com/ProjectPersephone

"Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

On Fri, Sep 17, 2021 at 4:19 AM wrote:

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Today's Topics:

1. Re: Haskell's "historical futurism" needs better writing, not better tools (Richard Eisenberg) 2. Re: Haskell's "historical futurism" needs better writing, not better tools (Jeffrey Brown) 3. Re: Haskell's "historical futurism" needs better writing, not better tools (Gregory Guthrie) 4. Re: Bundle patterns with type aliases (Carter Schonwald) 5. Re: Bundle patterns with type aliases (David Feuer) 6. Re: Bundle patterns with type aliases (David Feuer)

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Message: 1 Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2021 14:05:19 +0000 From: Richard Eisenberg To: Anthony Clayden Cc: haskell-cafe@haskell.org Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell's "historical futurism" needs better writing, not better tools Message-ID: <

010f017beeed148e-35512a1d-0412-45c5-b1ac-ca532fa70f72-000000@us-east-2.amazonses.com

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I just want to pipe up and say I'm not comfortable with this response.

When I feel this way about writing on a forum, I normally contact the author in private, but I think posting publicly here has its merits. I'm hoping that the long correspondence AntC and I have had -- often with opposing viewpoints but with mutual respect -- with withstand this email.

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Michael posted here expressing frustration with his experience learning

and using Haskell. In my opinion, he has spent too much time reading older papers, written by experts for experts -- which Michael is not. I do not fault Michael for this: these resources are sometimes what appear when searching, and we as a community have done a poor job marshaling our educational resources. (Michael, I just thought of a resource you might find useful: http://dev.stephendiehl.com/hask/ is an oft-linked resource attempting to do that marshaling. I am not vouching for it here, per se, but I know others have found it useful.)

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However, Michael very specifically said that "just learn

lambda-calculus" was not helpful for him, and so I think it's unhelpful for someone to respond with "just learn lambda-calculus". There are a number of other statements in the email below which could be seen as belittling -- also not helpful.

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Instead, I wish that we, as a community, could take posts like Michael's

at face value: this is the experience of someone who wants to learn Haskell. While some of the conclusions stated in that post are misunderstandings, it is not the sole fault of the learner for these misunderstandings: instead, we must try to understand what about our community and posted materials induced these misunderstandings, and then seek to improve. Many people in Michael's situation may not have posted at all -- and so this kind of information can be very hard to get.

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Michael, I have no silver bullet to offer to you to try to help you

here. I do tend to agree with AntC that you have developed some misconceptions that are hindering your continued learning. The terminology actively hurts here. (To be fair, the first Haskell standard pre-dates both Java and C++, and so one could argue who got the terms wrong.) For my part, I am trying to help with this situation both by trying to improve error messages, and though my support of the Haskell Foundation's Haskell School initiative (https://github.com/haskellfoundation/HaskellSchool). These will take time to grow, but my hope is that a future person like you will have an easier route in.

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In the meantime, I implore us to take all expressed experiences as

exactly that: the experience of the person writing. And if they say they don't want X, please let's not feed them X. :)

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Richard

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On Sep 16, 2021, at 12:53 AM, Anthony Clayden <

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Hi Michael, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

The seeds of your confusion are very evident from your message. How to

back you out of whatever deep rabbit-hole you've managed to get your head into?

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... Your average reader (already a programmer) would be better

served by a comparative approach: Here's how to say something in a couple of other programming languages, here's how to say something roughly equivalent in Haskell -- BUT, here's how it's subtly different in Haskell.

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No. Just no. Haskell is not "subtly different" to (say) Java in the

way that C++ or C# are different. (I'll leave others to judge how subtly different they are.)

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Haskell is dramatically and fundamentally different. You can't just

'translate' an algorithm from OOP to Haskell. Many newbies try, and there's many tales of woe on StackOverflow. Just No.

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I really don't know how you could have got any experience with Haskell

and say "subtly".

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I suggest you unlearn everything you think you know about Haskell, and

strike out in an entirely different direction. The best approach would be to spend a few days playing with lambda calculus. (That's what I did before tackling Haskell.)

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(I've actually been curtly informed on the beginners' list -- yes,

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Lambda calculus is an excellent place for beginners to start. What

could be easier to learn? It's certainly easier than grokking a Turing machine; and much easier than Haskell: less than a handful of primitives yet can compute anything computable.

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And since the concepts are seldom described in concrete enough and

time-honored programming language terms (by comparison to other programming languages)

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I'm guessing that the concepts you're talking of simply don't

correspond to anything in time-honoured (procedural) programming. Anybody writing about Haskell (including anybody writing the User Guide) assumes a

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(On the point of 'time-honoured': lambda calculus is almost exactly

anthony.d.clayden@gmail.com> wrote: the beginner' list! -- that my problems of comprehension can be solved simply: "Learn lambda calculus.") base level of understanding of Haskell. You've clearly veered off the track and haven't yet reached base. Remember the User Guide builds on top of the Language Report. the same age as Turing machines. The first well-known programming language using lambda-calculus ideas (LISP 1966) is almost exactly the same age as the first OOP language (Simula 1967). Which is the more time-honoured?)

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You do have a point that the terminology in Haskell is often mysterious

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[SPJ said] F# had settled on the term "workflow" instead of "monad",

and he felt this was wise.

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Yes many have yearned for a more warm-and-cuddly term than "monad".

But the terminology barrier starts before that.

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Haskell typeclasses are not 'classes' in any sense recognisable from

OOP. There are no objects, no hidden state, no destructive assignment. We might go back to February 1988 when a strawman for what became typeclasses used OVERLOAD/INSTANCE.

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AntC

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