Folks, Do you have examples of using Haskell as a DSL in an environment NOT targeted at people who know it already? I'm thinking of using Haskell to build my Mac trading app but I'm very concerned about dumping Haskell on the trading systems developers. It seems that using, say, Ruby as the trading systems DSL would give me a leg up since it's simple and syntax and generally warm and fuzzy. What do you think? Thanks, Joel P.S. Yes, I'm a big fan of "Composing Financial Contracts" -- http://wagerlabs.com/
On 7/5/06, Joel Reymont
Do you have examples of using Haskell as a DSL in an environment NOT targeted at people who know it already?
Lava: http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~koen/Lava/ "Lava is a hardware description language based upon the functional programming language Haskell. Its main aim is to show that modern programming language features such as type inference, polymorphism, higher-order functions, type classes, and laziness are very useful even in hardware description." The target audience is primarily hardware designers, not haskellers. /Niklas
On Jul 5, 2006, at 3:07 PM, Niklas Broberg wrote:
Excellent example, thank you Niklas! Are you using QuickCheck for verification? Thanks, Joel -- http://wagerlabs.com/
Joel Reymont skrev:
On Jul 5, 2006, at 3:07 PM, Niklas Broberg wrote:
Excellent example, thank you Niklas!
Are you using QuickCheck for verification?
I assume you're asking if Lava (rather than Niklas) uses QuickCheck. In Lava, you write properties in a style similar to QuickCheck props., but the actual verification is done by external tools. You still get the nice benefit of having description and verification within the same language. About teaching Lava (and probably other Haskell DSLs) to non Haskellers, I think that higher-order functions (and the type errors you get when using them incorrectly) is what causes most confusion among our students. A minority of them also finds it hard to use recursion instead of loops. Luckily, they don't have to use monads... I've been talking to a person at Intel who has been trying to teach their hardware designers to use a functional language (somewhat like Lava). This turned out to be much harder than expected, since the designers were so used to the imperative style. I'm not sure what the current status is, but they really have to make a trade-off between the time it takes to "convert" the designers and the quality (correctness/maintainability/performance/coding time/etc.) of the resulting code. It is important to show that functional programming has an advantage on the latter aspect (if that is the case). / Emil
Perhaps Functional Morphology http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~markus/FM/,
"a toolkit for morphology development" would be of interest.
--
Grzegorz
On 7/5/06, Joel Reymont
Folks,
Do you have examples of using Haskell as a DSL in an environment NOT targeted at people who know it already?
participants (4)
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Emil Axelsson -
Grzegorz Chrupała -
Joel Reymont -
Niklas Broberg