Re: [Haskell-cafe] Requesting Feedback: I Love Haskell, but can't find a place to use it
I love Haskell. It is my absolute favorite language. But I have a very hard time finding places where I can actually use it!
have you considered "your head" as such a place that should be easy to find.
An excellent reason. Haskell shines unusually brightly on applications that have an algebraic structure. Laziness relieves a plethora of sequencing concerns. I particularly treasure one experience: I asked a guru about the complexity of converting regular expressions to finite-state automata without epsilon transitions (state transitions that don't produce output). The best he knew was O(n^3), which is the cost of removing epsilon transitions from arbitrary automata. Then I wrote about a dozen lines of Haskell to do the job--and running time turned out to be O(n^2). Once I'd written the code, it became clear how to do it in other languages, but I never would have found the theorem without the help of Haskell. (This without even bringing in the heavy artillery of higher-order functions and monads.) Doug McIlroy
Then I wrote about a dozen lines of Haskell to do the job--and running time turned out to be O(n^2).
Do you still have the code?
2012/6/1 Doug McIlroy
I love Haskell. It is my absolute favorite language. But I have a very hard time finding places where I can actually use it!
have you considered "your head" as such a place that should be easy to find.
An excellent reason. Haskell shines unusually brightly on applications that have an algebraic structure. Laziness relieves a plethora of sequencing concerns. I particularly treasure one experience:
I asked a guru about the complexity of converting regular expressions to finite-state automata without epsilon transitions (state transitions that don't produce output). The best he knew was O(n^3), which is the cost of removing epsilon transitions from arbitrary automata. Then I wrote about a dozen lines of Haskell to do the job--and running time turned out to be O(n^2). Once I'd written the code, it became clear how to do it in other languages, but I never would have found the theorem without the help of Haskell. (This without even bringing in the heavy artillery of higher-order functions and monads.)
Doug McIlroy
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participants (2)
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Doug McIlroy -
Yves Parès