Recall the quote from
the May Day 2015 issue: The MLs and Haskell remind me of Brian Eno's line about how the first Velvet Underground album only sold 30,000 copies, but "everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band".
This issue spotlights Elm and Idris, two languages implemented in Haskell. Enjoy!
Top Picks:
- Evan Czaplicki of the Elm web-front-end language leaves Prezi for NoRedInk. A startup dedicated to improving high-school English grammar, NoRedInk already employs 5 engineers writing Elm full-time. A HN comment hyperbolizes that Elm "is Clojure without parens, it's Haskell without academy, it's Redux without facebook, it's duck-typing without quacks, it's MVC without objects, and last but not least Evan Czaplicki (the creator) is the new Aaron Patterson (bright and fun!)." [Ed. Aaron is a Ruby and also Rails core dev.]
- Janos Dobronszki, a self-described "Haskell addict, latent Idris fan", introduces Idris as "a language that will change the way you think about programming." He motivates dependent types using the classic list vector example. The Hacker News community enthuses over the article with healthy signs of grassroots static-typing evangelism. Elsewhere, a haskell redditor obtains valuable answers about the tradeoffs that dependently typed programming incurs.
- In "Monads to Machine Code (Part 1)", Stephen Diehl walks his readers through an LLVM-like runtime machine code generation while introducing the x86 architecture all at the same time. No mean feat, what more x86 as opposed to a RISC architecture. Much-loved on HN. Also on haskell reddit. Compare to Lennart Augustsson's older series on code generation. Quality packages on hackage for runtime code generation include harpy and llvm-general.
- A redditor wonders whether 3 nested loops written as a list comprehension compiles into the tight machine code version of 3 nested loops. Conspicuously absent in the discussion is mention of the Vector package and Don Stewart's 2010 achievements of tight loop optimization.
- ReinH: thanks puregreen for Lens over Tea series
puregreen: is grinning all around
ReinH: also thanks for not titling it "You could have written lens"
johnw: ReinH, just skip to, "You could have been edwardk", it answer all other questions
(Thanks to Gesh for the link.)
- From HN: One thing I've learned from using immutable, functional languages (Elixir) is: "Don't tell your computer what to do, tell it how to transform data." While it may seem obvious, it's been a revelation for me and it has totally transformed how I write code, and especially how I test it.
- From HN: FP people are nailing composability and reusability to never seen levels just in front of your eyes. You just have to keep them open to see. OOP did it at its time too, it just hit a ceiling; but there's one reason every imperative language is OOP nowadays.
- From HN: As someone who learned Haskell and subsequently have been writing a lot of Python, I keep a mental tally of how many of my bugs (some of which took ages to track down) would have been caught immediately by a type system like Haskell's or Idris'. I'd say it's well over half.
- From HN: Haskell syntax is the lingua franca when discussing anything related to data types and functional programming these days.
Videos of the Week: