On 1/28/07, Alexy Khrabrov wrote:

How do people stumble on Haskell?

Read Ullman's book on ML. Look at Haskell at that point, but was insufficiently mathematically sophisticated to "get it" (hey, I was sixteen). Wrote numerical analysis code in Forth for a year or so. Hacked on a several hundred thousand line FORTRAN 77 codebase. Wrote the simulation code for my physics thesis in C. Decided I never wanted to instantiate, destroy, or otherwise manage memory ever again. Had a hate-hate relationship with MATLAB, decided Mathematica was rubbish. Remembered Haskell. Now creating the programmatic equivalent of a cyborg, hunchback puppeteer to control a Java image analysis program in Scheme. So of course the best work I've done has been completely analytic mathematical physics without reference to computing of any kind. And I'm a biologist. This is known as being born in the Random monad. -- Frederick Ross Graduate Fellow, (|Siggia> + |McKinney>)/sqrt(2) Lab The Rockefeller University Je ne suis pas Fred Cross!

After many years of OO Perl, I looked at Python. Within fifteen minutes I had switched, and I never looked back at Perl. A few years later, I had a need to hack into the Python interpreter. While reading up on that, I came across references to Haskell. I soon realized that everything I liked about Python had been borrowed from Haskell in diluted form. -Yitz

On 1/28/07, Alexy Khrabrov wrote:

How do people stumble on Haskell? I've taught ML at UPenn, and many

For some diversity ... For years I'd been using (and largely happy with) pure fortran with a little tcl thrown in for scripting. I'd played around with a few other languages for kicks (Java, Lisp, c++), but never really found anything to pull me away from fortran for good: it's easy, insanely portable, and code I wrote in 1988 still works without modification. About 2 years ago I ran into a stability problem while taking numeric derivatives. In a moment of inspired procrastination, instead of properly fixing the problem I decided that I needed 'automatic differentiation'. Google. A series of fantastic papers by Jerzy Karczmarczuk. Wow. Google. GHC. Can't get it installed on my mac laptop. Stop. Months pass. (probably more like a year) In a later moment of procrastination, I find John Hughes' "Why functional programming matters". After seeing Romberg integration implemented in a handful of lines, I was hooked. But the real kicker was the performance of GHC -- after getting it installed I benchmarked the Hughes's code against a Fortran integrator. I don't remember the exact numbers, but the execution times were within a factor of a few of each other (I was expecting 2-3 orders of magnitude). While I'm not yet entirely sold on the practicality of the language (things move very fast, and it seems to be very difficult for me to stick with haskell98), it's just too much fun to not use. I'm now using it daily in a scripting role and one-offs, and I'm seriously considering using it over fortran in a new workstation analysis code. (Actually, the 'fun' aspect of it is providing a just a *bit* of motivation ...) Cheers, -david k.

On 2007-01-29, Alexy Khrabrov wrote:

How do people stumble on Haskell? I've taught ML at UPenn, and many

Fascinating thread. Awhile back, I decided that, once I got familiar and comfortable with a programming language, I would learn a new one. I tend a learn a new language every 1-3 years on average. I had been a convert from Perl to Python a few years back. I got comfortable with Python and decided I want to learn a new language. I looked at a number of them. Rejected Ruby because it was too much like Python, Erlang because it didn't seem general-purpose enough, Haskell because its library seemed small at the time and the focus too academic. I eventually learned OCaml. OCaml was an interesting experience. It had some nice features. But I/O was absolutely infruriating. OCaml's default I/O system can't handle files opened read-write, for instance. It also has two distinct list-like types: one that's lazy, one that's not, and they require two distinct sets of functions to work with. The object system also is complicated. The syntax and whole idea of .ml vs. .mli file felt very dated and the build system was extremely difficult to get right. So I again searched out a language, with largely the same results for everything except Haskell. I can't remember exactly what changed my mind about Haskell. It may have been Cabal, it may have been Darcs, or something else. In any case, I decided to pick it up. I was pleasantly surprised that Haskell seemed to have all the things I liked from both Python and OCaml and none of the annoying things from either. It's been a fun experience. Haskell is the only language I've ever learned in which I have used it for something like 2 years, written numerous applications, developed several libraries, even written links to C and Python, and still consider myself a newbie. And that is a GOOD thing. -- John

On 1/28/07, Alexy Khrabrov wrote:

How do people stumble on Haskell?

My story isn't as interesting as some of these. My first quarter in school, I took a course taught in Scheme. I expressed some dissatisfaction with the lack of types (and, in particular, the collection of bugs that would have been easily caught with one), and the grad TA pointed me to ML. Some time later, I was talking to another prof. in the hall about ML, and an older guy walking by suggested that I was wasting my time and should go learn Haskell. At the time, the most obvious tutorial was the Gentle Introduction, which left me confused for about a year or so, but eventually (and I have no memory the trigger), I started writing code in Haskell and was completely hooked. (Incidentally, I eventually found out who the older guy was - Doug McIlroy - and he ended up advising my honors work. All in all, a very convenient meeting.) /g

On Jan 29, 2007, at 03:01 , Alexy Khrabrov wrote:

How do people stumble on Haskell?

Well, I didn't really stumble on it. I was at the 1987 meeting when we decided to define Haskell. But I stumbled on functional programming in the first place. I had to learn it because it was part of a course in denotational semantics. The language was SASL. And then I read David Turners paper on combinators, and I was hooked. -- Lennart

On Sun, 28 Jan 2007, Alexy Khrabrov wrote:

How do people stumble on Haskell? I've taught ML at UPenn, and many of my colleagues in Amazon are in SeaFunc -- switching from C funk to func funk. I've got Hudak's book a while ago, but didn't have time/excuse to delve into it until recently. Then the most fantastic chain if events triggered it:

I read sigfpe and got interested. -- Mikael Johansson | To see the world in a grain of sand mikael@johanssons.org | And heaven in a wild flower http://www.mikael.johanssons.org | To hold infinity in the palm of your hand | And eternity for an hour

On 1/28/07, Alexy Khrabrov wrote:

How do people stumble on Haskell?

I came at it from two angles: General interest in actor languages led me to Io (http://www.iolanguage.com), which used Darcs for its RCS at the time, which led me to look at the source code for it, which got me interested in Haskell. General interest in lightweight concurrency led me to STM, which is a short trip. -- Paul