Re: [Haskell-cafe] Ideas
Neil Mitchell wrote:
HI
Flippi (google: Haskell Flippi)
...and yet haskell.org uses WikiMedia? (Which is written in something bizzare like Perl...)
Yes, but WikiMedia is a result of years of work, Flippi is a lot less. Wikipedia uses WikiMedia - its a tried and proven solution.
Well, I guess... I just thought, you know, the Tcl wiki is written in Tcl, why isn't the Haskell wiki written in Haskell? Hey, aren't we trying to tell people is a *useful* language that people should learn and use? ;-)
- A "graphical programming tool". (You add boxes and put in lines, it constructs a "program" that you can run.)
Have you ever played with KLogic? You draw boxes and lines, and it makes some logic. (As in the digital electronics sense of "logic".)
I have some (very expensive) software called Reaktor. You draw boxes and lines, it does DSP algorithms. You build synthesizers and effects boxes with it.
That sounds exactly like PureData - you can also do graphics as well with PureData, the demo I saw was very cool. Of course, PureData is written in C with Haskell as an extension language.
Oh. Ah well..
The last two ideas you mentioned require a graphical user interface, which is an area of Haskell which is comparatively weak, compared to the rest of Haskell.
Yeah, I noticed. Though actually Gtk2hs isn't too bad. (There's a few corners that require bit-flipping and other low-level strangeness...)
On Aug 25, 2007, at 14:43 , Andrew Coppin wrote:
Neil Mitchell wrote:
HI
Flippi (google: Haskell Flippi)
...and yet haskell.org uses WikiMedia? (Which is written in something bizzare like Perl...)
Yes, but WikiMedia is a result of years of work, Flippi is a lot less. Wikipedia uses WikiMedia - its a tried and proven solution.
Well, I guess...
I just thought, you know, the Tcl wiki is written in Tcl, why isn't the Haskell wiki written in Haskell? Hey, aren't we trying to tell people is a *useful* language that people should learn and use? ;-)
Are you volunteering to take the time to write and test it? -- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH
Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:
On Aug 25, 2007, at 14:43 , Andrew Coppin wrote:
Yes, but WikiMedia is a result of years of work, Flippi is a lot less. Wikipedia uses WikiMedia - its a tried and proven solution.
Well, I guess...
I just thought, you know, the Tcl wiki is written in Tcl, why isn't the Haskell wiki written in Haskell? Hey, aren't we trying to tell people is a *useful* language that people should learn and use? ;-)
Are you volunteering to take the time to write and test it?
Are you offering to pay me? :-D Oh, wait, "volunteer"... Well, let's put it this way: If I ever get round to making something and it turns out to be any good, you're free to use it... Don't hold your breath... ;-) PS. Do paid Haskell jobs really exist?
On Sat, Aug 25, 2007 at 07:43:30PM +0100, Andrew Coppin wrote:
Neil Mitchell wrote:
HI
Flippi (google: Haskell Flippi)
...and yet haskell.org uses WikiMedia? (Which is written in something bizzare like Perl...)
Yes, but WikiMedia is a result of years of work, Flippi is a lot less. Wikipedia uses WikiMedia - its a tried and proven solution.
Well, I guess...
I just thought, you know, the Tcl wiki is written in Tcl, why isn't the Haskell wiki written in Haskell? Hey, aren't we trying to tell people is a *useful* language that people should learn and use? ;-)
Actually, we aren't. You might not have been able to tell, but a core goal of our community is to stay small and avoid success at all costs; our language is not practical, not designed to be practical, and if it ever becomes practical, it will have done so only by a terrible streak of bad luck. Remember, success breeds inertia, and inertia would ruin our fundamental goal of being an agile research language. :) Stefan
Stefan O'Rear wrote:
On Sat, Aug 25, 2007 at 07:43:30PM +0100, Andrew Coppin wrote:
Hey, aren't we trying to tell people is a *useful* language that people should learn and use? ;-)
Actually, we aren't. You might not have been able to tell, but a core goal of our community is to stay small and avoid success at all costs; our language is not practical, not designed to be practical, and if it ever becomes practical, it will have done so only by a terrible streak of bad luck. Remember, success breeds inertia, and inertia would ruin our fundamental goal of being an agile research language.
Heh. Well, that told me... o_O Maybe *this* is why everybody else thinks I'm an idiot for using Haskell... :-( PS. Wasn't one of the explicit design goals "to design a standardised language for teaching FP"?
*useful* language that people should learn and use? ;-)
Actually, we aren't. You might not have been able to tell, but a core goal of our community is to stay small and avoid success at all costs; our language is not practical, not designed to be practical, and if it ever becomes practical, it will have done so only by a terrible streak of bad luck. Remember, success breeds inertia, and inertia would ruin our fundamental goal of being an agile research language.
Well, IMHO the only reasons why Haskell is not a language for the masses are: - No marketing. If a company as big as Microsoft would decide that Haskell is to become the standard language, then it would be so. - Ancient IDEs. When someone comes from Eclipse or Visual Studio it feels one is teleported back to the stone ages. Although Visual Haskell looks promising, it seems to be in the pre-beta stage. - Although the documentation is very good, it is rather bulky, which can scare away newbies. - As Haskell is currently used a lot by people with an average IQ of 160, the available packages and programming approaches are not easily absorbed for the average software engineer with an IQ of 120 ;-) However, once you take your time to dig deep into the matter, one often sees the beauty behind it. But many newbies just feel really stupid when they look at Haskell code :) I certainly did and still do, but fortunately I know I'm not very clever, so that's okay ;) - I haven't looked at the debuggers, but I've heared Haskell is really hard to debug. Anyway, although my IQ is far below 160, I find Haskell the most exciting language I have ever learned (and I've only scratched the bare surface of the language) Cheers, Peter Verswyvelen
Peter Verswyvelen wrote:
Well, IMHO the only reasons why Haskell is not a language for the masses are:
- No marketing. If a company as big as Microsoft would decide that Haskell is to become the standard language, then it would be so.
See, for example, Java...
- Ancient IDEs.
Can't comment. Every IDE I've used recently sucked anyway. ;-)
- As Haskell is currently used a lot by people with an average IQ of 160, the available packages and programming approaches are not easily absorbed for the average software engineer with an IQ of 120 ;-) However, once you take your time to dig deep into the matter, one often sees the beauty behind it. But many newbies just feel really stupid when they look at Haskell code :) I certainly did and still do, but fortunately I know I'm not very clever, so that's okay ;)
I have an IQ of 103. Apparently. (This makes me officially the most stupid person on the povray.off-topic newsgroup...)
- I haven't looked at the debuggers, but I've heared Haskell is really hard to debug.
OTOH, Haskell requires less debugging in the first place. ;-)
Anyway, although my IQ is far below 160, I find Haskell the most exciting language I have ever learned (and I've only scratched the bare surface of the language)
Indeed. Personally, I don't *want* Haskell to be a research language. I want Haskell to be The Next Big Thing. I want to see newspapers full of people trying to recruit Haskell programmers rather than all this C / C++ / Java stuff. ;-) Still, it will never happen... Would be nice if I could convince people that Haskell isn't just for idiots though.
On 8/26/07, Stefan O'Rear
Actually, we aren't. You might not have been able to tell, but a core goal of our community is to stay small and avoid success at all costs; our language is not practical, not designed to be practical, and if it ever becomes practical, it will have done so only by a terrible streak of bad luck. Remember, success breeds inertia, and inertia would ruin our fundamental goal of being an agile research language.
Yes! We agree :-) Can someone please do something about the horrible paragraph at the end of this page here: http://www.haskell.org/complex/why_does_haskell_matter.html , which is what inspired my rather passive/agressive attitude to the Haskell community ;-) "Another reaso for the lack of Haskell, and other functional languages, in mainstream use is that programming languages are rarely thought of as tools (even though they are). To most people their favorite programming language is much more like religion - it just seems unlikely that any other language exists that can get the job done better and faster. There is a paper by Paul Graham called Beating the Averages describing his experience using Lisp, another functional language, for an upstart company. In it he uses an analogy which he calls "The Blub Paradox". It goes a little something like this: If a programmer's favorite language is Blub, which is positioned somewhere in the middle of the "power spectrum", he can most often only identify languages that are lower down in the spectrum. He can look at COBOL and say "How can anyone get anything done in that language, it doesn't have feature x", x being a feature in Blub. However, this Blub programmer has a harder time looking the other way in the spectrum. If he examines languages that are higher up in the power spectrum, they will just seem "weird" because the Blub programmer is "thinking in Blub" and can not possibly see the uses for various features of more powerful languages. It goes without saying that this inductively leads to the conclusion that to be able to compare all languages you'll need to position yourself at the top of the power spectrum. It is my belief that functional languages, almost by definition, are closer to the top of the power spectrum than imperative ones. So languages can actually limit a programmers frame of thought. If all you've ever programmed is Blub, you may not see the limitations of Blub - you may only do that by switching to another level which is more powerful." The author of this paragraph fails to realize that the Blub Paradox cut both ways ;-) Anyway, there I've said it, so that's out of the way perhaps :-D
Oooo... just noticed that the page is not anonymous.... errrmmmm :-D
participants (5)
-
Andrew Coppin -
Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH -
Hugh Perkins -
Peter Verswyvelen -
Stefan O'Rear