Hello Neil, Sunday, December 10, 2006, 6:22:44 PM, you wrote:

...

your tasks, because there is strange variations in syntax, and strange behaviors in components.

Behaviours in syntax? Really? When following Haskell 98 (the language standard)? I use at least 3 Haskell compilers/interpreters and the differences are nearly none.

sorry, but imho H98 can't be used for real program development. btw, are you know large programs that can be compiled with H98 compilers, such as nhc, yhc and jhc? -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com

Hi

sorry, but imho H98 can't be used for real program development. btw, are you know large programs that can be compiled with H98 compilers, such as nhc, yhc and jhc?

Yhc itself. Hoogle. Catch (~25000 lines). Haskell 98 is a great language, sure there are bits that could be tweaked to make it easier to program in, but its got all the good stuff in it. Thanks Neil

...

(Even clean has a simple GUI. Is it that hard to provide a simple GUI like that to be installed by default?)

Why not provide two, that can be installed? Gtk2Hs and wxHaskell. You can bundle them by default, or download them, the difference is minimal.

In my humble opinion, in this context, GUI doesn't mean a library to implement a GUI application. It rather means an interpreter/compiler that provides graphical interface. Kaveh Shahbazian is a little bit wrong since there are some implementation with graphic interface like Hugs. But since Hugs is not a compiler but an interpreter, ones who are to develop a real world application will hardly choose it. Unless we are making in some specific fields e.g. a web application, we would often need to get a compiled executable one. In this point of view, there is no Haskell implementation with GUI environment for real world application development yet. This may not matter a lot since we've got some alternatives like Haskell in Eclipse, Haskell in Emacs, Visual Haskell, etc. But anyway I want some GUI built in GHC/GHCi too.

Hi Bulat. Ones who can handle and compile with GHC won't feel anything absurd working with a console, CLI environment. They won't regard the lack of GUI as a problem. But Kaveh does. It doesn't make sense that there would be anyone who first develop in Hugs(deliberately not GHCi since it has no GUI) and then compile it with GHC(which is far away from GUI, yet). People who will (finally) compile their program in GHC would simply choose GHCi over Hugs. Or else, is there any merit of Hugs that GHCi doesn't have?

On 12/11/06, Nia Rium wrote:

In my humble opinion, in this context, GUI doesn't mean a library to implement a GUI application. It rather means an interpreter/compiler that provides graphical interface.

Windows users can use Visual Haskell... -- Taral "You can't prove anything." -- Gödel's Incompetence Theorem

On 12/11/06, Philippa Cowderoy wrote:

Only those who already have Visual Studio, no?

Yes, that is an unfortunate limitation. -- Taral "You can't prove anything." -- Gödel's Incompetence Theorem

Thanks again. Look all. When I (and I think everybody here) make a discussion about Haskell, It is not about to dominating anyone('s opinions) or attacking to Haskell (for Haskell evangelists!); Haskell is great enough that surely will lead - if not "be" - the next picture for meaning of "SOFTWARE DEVELOPING". I did not know anything about functional programming. I have a B.S. in telecommunications and ... as you know one day I woke up in bed lying beside my beloved codes! And there I became a programmer! Then I came across with scripting : Ruby! Lovely! Fantastic! At first It was very hard for my "c-writer" mind to even understand what this "scripting thing" is. But at last I felt It and learned how to do It. And with more reading, suddenly there was something totally different : Functional Programming. See : Reduced of many many type of bugs in your code; why? No side effect! Debugging! Profiling! Type safety! So why I say that? Again see : In less than five years we will have processors with normally six cores or more and fast hardware - very cheap. Hold that. So you still want to pay your developers for checking "NULL" values, correctness of "INTERFACES", writing "IF ELSE" and "SELECT CASE"s full of side effect and junks (Something that can be simply implemented by "Pattern Matching"), continuing OO world that has not even a accurate calculus for describing things (and came from industrial engineering), code that may crash through exceptions and very stupid-complex execution paths, checking array out-of rang things, handling and passing and dereferencing pointers correctly...............OOOOH! Just calculate that how % of developer's time is being consumed by this stupid tasks? You know; this will be a big-bang for commercials! (If their stupid consultants can understand). I am a usual developer, not smart and academic as you, and not as stupid ones to pretend to know something better than all. Even this kind of programming still is very hard for me. I am still struggling with monads and monad transformers! So I am choosing the hard path - even very hard one. Why? Because I am sure every mean developer like me can be productive in functional programming in 6 to 12 months. And imagine that huge bunch of stupid things that we are handling everyday : Just wast of life and money without any joy and honor. This is my vision : FIVE YEARS ... Best Regards

On Tue, Dec 12, 2006 at 10:58:18AM +0000, Kirsten Chevalier wrote:

Functional programming people have a reputation for arrogance -- whether that impression is fair or not and whether that arrogance is merited or not, the impression exists, and some people find it a turn-off.

Aren't you talking about the LISP community? ;-) Best regards Tomasz

Hi

That's exactly the problem! For most people there *is* no difference. You say "functional programming" to most people, even professional programmers, and usually the only chance you have of getting them to understand what what you mean is by asking "so, have you heard of Lisp, or Scheme?"

Talking to professional programmers, if I tell anyone I program in Haskell they nearly always say "oh, Pascal, that's cool". No one knows what functional programming is, Scheme/Lisp are the closest. Maybe we should try and hijack the phrase functional programming - Haskell is just too similar to Pascal. Thanks Neil

ndmitchell:

Hi

...

That's exactly the problem! For most people there *is* no difference. You say "functional programming" to most people, even professional programmers, and usually the only chance you have of getting them to understand what what you mean is by asking "so, have you heard of Lisp, or Scheme?"

Talking to professional programmers, if I tell anyone I program in Haskell they nearly always say "oh, Pascal, that's cool". No one knows what functional programming is, Scheme/Lisp are the closest. Maybe we should try and hijack the phrase functional programming - Haskell is just too similar to Pascal.

Who wants to join the Lisp is not functional programming movement with me? -- Don "If it ain't pure, it ain't functional" Stewart

Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:

Who wants to join the Lisp is not functional programming movement with me?

Oh, lordy. As if the "Scheme is not Lisp" flames on comp.lang.lisp weren't enough...

Neil Mitchell wrote:

Maybe we should try and hijack the phrase functional programming - Haskell is just too similar to Pascal.

This reminds me of when I was getting an X-ray a few months ago and I struck up a conversation with the radiologist who turned out to be an ex-computer programmer so he asked what language I was using so I said "Haskell" and he said something like "Oh yeah Pascal I know that..." Perhaps we need a tutorial on how to pronounce the word "Haskell" so that it doesn't sound like "Pascal" :-) (eg "Hiskeeeell") Brian. -- http://www.metamilk.com

Hi,

Actually, the more I think of it, the more I think we should rename the language altogether. It seems like people say "Haskell" with stress on the first syllable if they were either on the committee or learned it inside academia, and "Haskell" with stress on the second syllable if they learned it from online sources. And we really don't need more pronunciation-based class distinctions.

If you'd all speak West-Flemish, the problem would solve itself :-) We say Haskul - Has(lle)ul(cer) At least, that what I think the Oxford dictionary means with its pronounciation description. Maybe we can claim it should be 'has kell', where kell is something cool, and no cornflakes. It has kell. -- Andy

Maybe we can claim it should be 'has kell', where kell is something cool, and no cornflakes. It has kell.

if there was an implementation of Haskell on Cell processors, it could be "has cell".. I wonder if knowing what people are going to do with your name is sufficient to put students off becoming a mathematician ;-) but on the Pascal note: is there anything in Pascal that Haskell doesn't provide, and improves on (nested procedures, procedure parameters, distinguishing in and out parameters, types, ..)? it has been too long since my Pascal days, I don't remember.. apart from the communication problem of understanding Haskell as Pascal: if you're talking to someone who knows Pascal, it might not be a bad idea to position Haskell as a drastically modernized version of Pascal, to get the discussion of real merits going? claus -- Trac ticket #-42: subject: when trying to bootstrap GHC on the PS3, configure complains "can't find hardware"? status -> closed (no bug) comment: it is a _next_ generation console!

On 12/12/06, Andreas Rossberg wrote:

Claus Reinke wrote:

...

but on the Pascal note: is there anything in Pascal that Haskell doesn't provide, and improves on (nested procedures, procedure parameters, distinguishing in and out parameters, types, ..)?

Subrange types, maybe? But I'm sure Oleg will show us that Haskell already has them. :-)

Maybe the real question should be: is there anything in Pascal that Haskell's type system doesn't provide? Cheers, Kirsten -- Kirsten Chevalier* chevalier@alum.wellesley.edu *Often in error, never in doubt "Other than to amuse himself, why should a man pretend to know where he's going or to understand what he sees?" -- William Least Heat Moon

On 12/12/06, Claus Reinke wrote:

...

Maybe we can claim it should be 'has kell', where kell is something cool, and no cornflakes. It has kell.

if there was an implementation of Haskell on Cell processors, it could be "has cell"..

Pronounced "hassle"? :-) -- Sebastian Sylvan +46(0)736-818655 UIN: 44640862

Hello Kirsten, Tuesday, December 12, 2006, 4:28:18 PM, you wrote:

Actually, the more I think of it, the more I think we should rename the language altogether.

"Curry" would have avoided this problem.

we can also rename Pascal to Blez to avoid confusion -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com

On 12/12/06, Arie Peterson wrote:

...

Haskell is just too similar to Pascal.

This makes me wonder how people pronounce "Pascal". It's probably because I'm from Europe, but I put the stress on the second syllable. Pronouncing it like "rascal" is, well, funny :-).

For whatever it's worth, I'm American and have mainly heard Americans pronounce it with the stress on the second syllable -- however, when I mention programming in Haskell to other Americans, I get the "oh, you mean Pascal?" response sometimes too, even though I pronounce "Haskell" with the stress on the first syllable. I'm not sure why, since it's not as if anyone programs in Pascal anymore. Cheers, Kirsten -- Kirsten Chevalier* chevalier@alum.wellesley.edu *Often in error, never in doubt "Never wear shorts with the name of your town across the ass if you live in Needham." -- Beth Murphy

On 12/12/06, Brian Hulley wrote:

Kirsten Chevalier wrote:

...

since it's not as if anyone programs in Pascal anymore.

Yet I'm sure most people who did a computer science degree some decades ago remember the old joke about passing things by name or value for what it's Wirth... :-)

I was kidding slightly. My first programming language was Pascal, but I guess I should be grateful that I didn't take the same course a year later, because then my first language would have been Java. In fact, a comment from Lyn Turbak, who taught the second-semester computer science class I took at Wellesley, is in some sense or another half of the reason why I'm participating in this discussion today -- a student (not me) asked him, "why are we learning Pascal if you hate the language so much?" and he explained, "Historical accident..." and talked about the reasons why Pascal ended up being a popular teaching language. Much later, I'm amazed at how few students ask this kind of question and how few teachers talk about the answers to them. I think this relates back to the point of the original discussion. People (except people on this mailing list, and a few similar fora) don't talk much about the reasons for choosing programming languages. When they do talk about it, it's usually very prescriptively oriented rather than descriptively oriented. I think that it would serve this community well if somebody was able to achieve a better understanding of the social reasons why some programming languages are adopted and some aren't. I think all of us already know that the reason isn't "because some are better than others," but it might be time for someone to go beyond that. Cheers, Kirsten -- Kirsten Chevalier* chevalier@alum.wellesley.edu *Often in error, never in doubt "THEY CAN KILL YOU, BUT THE LEGALITIES OF EATING YOU ARE QUITE A BIT DICIER" --David Foster Wallace

Hi, On 13 Dec 2006, at 00:17, Joachim Durchholz wrote:

Kirsten Chevalier schrieb:

...

I think that it would serve this community well if somebody was able to achieve a better understanding of the social reasons why some programming languages are adopted and some aren't. I think all of us already know that the reason isn't "because some are better than others," but it might be time for someone to go beyond that.

Actually, it's quite simple: following the ideology de jour and teaching-relevant support.

Teachers will teach what's mainstream ideology (I'm using "ideology" in a strictly neutral sense here). Pascal was popular because teachers felt that structured programming should be taught to the masses, and you couldn't abuse goto in Pascal to make a program unstructured. Later, universities shifted more towards "economic usefulness". Which made C (and, later, Java) much more interesting ideologically.

Since the rise of Java, our university has been teaching almost nothing else. A short course in C, the FP course is being phased out. Some teachers had an interest in having Java knowledgeable kids graduating. I guess the industry also asked for Java knowledge in general. I think it's sad for the students. A language is sometimes more than just syntax, the paradigms it uses should be known, and I've seen too many students who have no clue what a pointer is, who cannot apply simply things such as map and filter ... I'm no haskell wizard, but the very basics I do grok.

Teaching-relevant support means: readily available tools. I.e. compilers, debuggers, editor support, and all of this with campus licenses or open sourced.

I don't think that Haskell can compete on the ideological front right now. That domain is firmly in the area of C/C++/Java. Erlang isn't really winning here either, but it does have the advantage of being connected to success stories from Ericsson. To really compete, Haskell needs what people like to call "industrial-strength": industrial-strength compilers, industrial- strength libraries, industrial-strength IDEs. In other words, seamless Eclipse and Visual Studio integration, heaps and heaps of libraries, and bullet-proof compilers, all of this working right out of the box. (I see that this all is being worked on.)

Having a(n important) company backing Haskell in a platform- independent way would certainly help, IMHO. But to convince people to use it, they need to be taught before they go out to find a job. -- Andy

On 12/13/06, Bulat Ziganshin wrote:

Hello Joachim,

Wednesday, December 13, 2006, 2:17:08 AM, you wrote:

...

Actually, it's quite simple: following the ideology de jour and teaching-relevant support.

are you remember title of Wirth's book? "algorithms + data structures = programs". i think that Haskell is ideal language for teaching programming now (like Pascal was in 80's), because it teaches how to develop algorithms instead of focusing on implementation details. of course, you are right that fashion and availability drives actual teachers selection

That's a good point too. Actually, though, my original comment about understanding the reasons for programming language adoption was not just meant to refer to adoption in an educational context, but also to the reasons why people adopt the languages they do for commercial (or research or free software) projects, as well; so, I don't think it's quite *that* simple, although I should have been more clear. Cheers, Kirsten -- Kirsten Chevalier* chevalier@alum.wellesley.edu *Often in error, never in doubt "Base eight is just like base ten, really... if you're missing two fingers." -- Tom Lehrer

Tomasz Zielonka schrieb:

On Wed, Dec 13, 2006 at 12:17:08AM +0100, Joachim Durchholz wrote:

...

Haskell needs... bullet-proof compilers, all of this working right out of the box. (I see that this all is being worked on.)

Come on, C++ got popular in spite of having NO bullet-proof, let alone complete compilers.

OK, there's the option of replacing working tools with hype. It worked for C++, and it worked for Java. Pity I don't have the slightest idea how to work up a hype for Haskell. Regards, Jo

Tomasz Zielonka schrieb:

On Thu, Dec 14, 2006 at 09:56:57PM +0100, Joachim Durchholz wrote:

...

OK, there's the option of replacing working tools with hype. It worked for C++, and it worked for Java. Pity I don't have the slightest idea how to work up a hype for Haskell.

Who would want such a hype? Why not simply start picking up fruits before the mainstream notices? ;-)

Because a mainstream language has more tools, more libraries, and an easier job search. Regards, Jo

The core of the 'Blub Paradox'. There is almost no upside for a manager to approve an 'unusual' language for a project. Most technology changes are driven by engineers, and most engineers are by nature risk averse, even though they also tend to be neophiles. So, on a given project, they'll try one, maybe two new things, but ones they think have a high chance of sucess. Smart managers let these bets be made, because a technology advantage is often a force multiplier. Now, engineers have to decide where to spend their intellectual capital and the markers they can call in from management. Haskell seems to be a good place to spend intellectual capital. There certainly seems to be some growing consensus that functional programming approaches are the next 'big thing'. Multicore and true concurrency seem to demand a new approach. The question in my mind is, is Haskell the Smalltalk of the '10s or the Java? Either way, I already believe that it's worthwhile learning. As to libraries, they seem to be the natural result of engineers learning new languages. And because of the internet and open source, you get a positive feedback cycle. The Jakarta project is the best recent example. Almost overnight, java became the defacto serverside language. A niche almost opposite where the language was being pitched. So what can Haskell do better enough that the feedback cycle can be jumpstarted? On 12/15/06, Joachim Durchholz wrote:

Tomasz Zielonka schrieb:

...

On Thu, Dec 14, 2006 at 09:56:57PM +0100, Joachim Durchholz wrote:

...

OK, there's the option of replacing working tools with hype. It worked for C++, and it worked for Java. Pity I don't have the slightest idea how to work up a hype for Haskell.

Who would want such a hype? Why not simply start picking up fruits before the mainstream notices? ;-)

Because a mainstream language has more tools, more libraries, and an easier job search.

Regards, Jo

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Hi, Am Donnerstag, den 14.12.2006, 21:56 +0100 schrieb Joachim Durchholz:

OK, there's the option of replacing working tools with hype. It worked for C++, and it worked for Java. Pity I don't have the slightest idea how to work up a hype for Haskell.

IMHO, three is already a haskell hype, considering the increase of activity in the last two years or so. It’s just not a mainstream hype, but so far the hype target group has been very pleasant :-) Greetings, Joachim -- Joachim Breitner e-Mail: mail@joachim-breitner.de Homepage: http://www.joachim-breitner.de ICQ#: 74513189

The front end for the comeau compiler is from Edison Design Group, and that's the one that is used by many other compilers. And the EDG compiler is regarded as being the most conformant. Besides MS and the FSF (visual c++ and gcc), both Sun and IBM have c++ compiler toolchains not based on EDG. If they were, my life would be much simpler. The late additions of the STL, and some concommitant changes to how templates worked, really caused a lot of the difficulties in implementation. That, and the installed base problem. Having version N of a language change the meaning of programs targetting version N-1 tends to upset users. The STL, however, brings a very applicative programming model into an otherwise imperative language. And, it turns out that the template language is a turing complete pure functional language, making possible some very interesting type based metaprogramming. Of course, since it wasn't really designed as such, it has to be heavily sugared to be useful. On 12/14/06, Bulat Ziganshin wrote:

Hello Tomasz,

Thursday, December 14, 2006, 11:32:33 PM, you wrote:

...

complete compilers. Two years ago the only full compiler for C++ was Comeau, probably unknown to most C++ programmers. I am not sure about today, but I wouldn't bet that things improved.

just because they don't know what sits at back of their compiler? :)

someone tells me, that only 2.5 front-ends remain - comeau, gcc and probably MS. all other compilers use comeau, which is not full compiler but just front-end

there is old joke that camel is a horse created by committee. Algol-68, Pl/1, Ada and now C++ becomes such large languages that no one can master them in full details

-- Best regards, Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com

_______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe

Brian Hulley wrote:

Yet I'm sure most people who did a computer science degree some decades ago remember the old joke about passing things by name or value for what it's Wirth... :-)

Wikipedia says: “Whereas Europeans generally pronounce my name the right way ('Ni-klows Wirt'), Americans invariably mangle it into 'Nick-les Worth'. This is to say that Europeans call me by name, but Americans call me by value.” :)

On 12/13/06, Kaveh Shahbazian wrote:

I think this is going out of the way. Excuse me, but the main discussion was not about pascal!

This list is exactly for off-topic discussions :-)

And thanks again to all. Now I think there is a bigger whole between current situation of Haskell and using It as a real tool, than what I thought before. But any way; I still have a hope for rising a new folk of thinkers in software world that will put ideas to work more practically. Haskell got academic-centric-being syndrome, as JAVA got perfectionism syndrome (see elegant and useless design patterns and architectures there!). I can not imagine a pure and clear vision about this new folk that IT world lakes now. If anyone helps me with clarification of this thing, It will be great to me!

The reason why Haskell is academic-centric is that it was originally conceived by academics, and they were interested in doing research into language design and implementation and also had jobs to take care of and all of this doesn't leave much time for being a language evangelist or for figuring out what the practical issues might be (not to mention sleeping at night). People outside academia who might be inclined to take on some of those more practical questions are just beginning to notice that Haskell could be useful for them too. The reason this didn't happen earlier was that there was no marketing budget. It had to happen in a grassroots fashion, and IMO it couldn't have happened until after the rise of distributed open-source development (which, I remind you, didn't start gaining a lot of momentum until not that long ago). You could become one of those "new folk of thinkers". Be the change you wish to see. Cheers, Kirsten -- Kirsten Chevalier* chevalier@alum.wellesley.edu *Often in error, never in doubt "They say the world is just a stage you're on...or going through." --Jim Infantino

Hallo, On 12/13/06, Claus Reinke wrote:

we have had lots of languages that were intended to be well-designed (good, beautiful, ..), but never much used in practice, and we have also had lots of languages that were intended to be pragmatic (practical, useful, ..), without much interest in theoretical beauty. but how many languages are there where the two aspects have converged, with both communities still actively interested in the result?

Lua is a small scripting language created in academia, whose authors are academics, that has reached the industry embedded in several well-known products such as World of Warcraft or Adobe Lightroom (which is 40% Lua). Frequently people ask for bloat in the mailing list, and the usual answer is "why?". The authors claim that when thinking about a new version of Lua they don't think of features to add, but what features they can remove. So I'd say it's perfectly possible to have an academia-backed language useful for the "real world". Cheers, -- -alex http://www.ventonegro.org/

On 12/13/06, Claus Reinke wrote:

...

The reason why Haskell is academic-centric is that it was originally conceived by academics, and they were interested in doing research into language design and implementation ..

shouldn't we make this "used to be academic-centric"?

I think that's still slightly premature, although it seems like a ton of progress has been made just this year.

...

People outside academia who might be inclined to take on some of those more practical questions are just beginning to notice that Haskell could be useful for them too. ..

although "just beginning to notice" may be accurate on a historical scale, I have the feeling that the actual development is further along than this. at least, there have been sufficiently many and active early adopters for long enough to make a substantial difference. so those practical questions are not being raised, but several of them are actually being addressed.

Certainly, and not to in any way denigrate the early adopters' work (and I am, I guess, an early adopter, though not one who's actually contributed much). I guess I was just trying to say to the poster I was replying to that if you're still not happy with the level of practicality of Haskell tools now, either jump in and help improve them yourself, or if you don't want to do that, have a little patience -- they'll get there soon enough.

one of the most exciting aspects of Haskell is that pragmatic interest in the language has been growing steadily without academic interest in it declining in any way. as a result, we have a language that represents an interesting mixture of good and useful, although it is not entirely clear yet how long this nice balance will hold.

we have had lots of languages that were intended to be well-designed (good, beautiful, ..), but never much used in practice, and we have also had lots of languages that were intended to be pragmatic (practical, useful, ..), without much interest in theoretical beauty. but how many languages are there where the two aspects have converged, with both communities still actively interested in the result?

I'm interested to see what's going to happen, too. To answer your question with another, how many languages are there that have quite the same kind of people committed to them that Haskell does? :-) Cheers, Kirsten -- Kirsten Chevalier* chevalier@alum.wellesley.edu *Often in error, never in doubt "Happy is all in your head / When you wake up and you're not dead / It's a sign of maturation / That you've lowered your expectations..."--Barbara Kessler

well, if Sun hadn't have released a version of smalltalk with a funny c like syntax, you might have seen some interesting developments in the mid 90's

yes, perhaps. but now that funny smalltalk is open source, the self team has been released from indenture (after Scheme and Self people, Sun is known to have hired at least one Haskeller;-), and the strongtalk vm is open source. I'm still a fan of the old ideas in that community, although I no longer expect much from that language itself (it still has features that are fundamentally lacking in Haskell, but Haskell has at least as many features that are fundamentally lacking in Squeak, say; and I tend to the conclusion that it would be easier to start from the Haskell side if one wanted the best of both worlds). but the people who were behind smalltalk are still up to wonderful stuff, just off the mainstream (for instance, anyone interested in one possible future wrt to user interfaces ought to read some of the papers on the croquet project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_project ; and don't let yourself be fooled by the screenshots - there is much more thought behind that than behind the run-of-the-mill virtual 3d distributed reflective live-programmable multi-user collaborative environment:). but I wasn't saying that there are no other languages with similar convergence effects. I was suggesting that there are few, very few such languages, especially considering the flood of languages in both the academic and the pragmatic camps. being a member of these illustrous few, Haskell has become a conduit for exchange of ideas and problems between the two camps, giving it a distinct advantage over most of its contemporaries. and while it may be true that the effects have only become widely noticable not too long ago, the development has been going on for a long time (one example: Conal Elliot's ideas for Fran had pragmatic needs that used to drive new developments in Hugs/ GHC many years ago). and from watching the development over many years, I have the feeling that the curve is exponential (but perhaps I'm just channelling Kurzweil;-). so even if we are still near the beginning of that curve, perhaps, in the not too distant future, when some group of clever folks starts a project as interesting as Croquet, they'll use Haskell rather than Squeak? for me, the aim of Haskell is to be an enabler for such developments, in both academia and industry, and especially where the two come together. but let's wait and see, shall we?-) Claus

On Thu, Dec 14, 2006 at 03:03:51AM -0500, Mark Goldman wrote:

I have been keeping up with this thread. As a user of Haskell for comercial purposes, I can say that it does what I want. The only thing currently on my wish-list is some sort of run time debuging. (sometimes you want to know how you got to the empty list that you took the head of :) Anyhow, I find haskell more than adequete for my programming. I say this to set up my next statement. I really don't want there to be huge accretions to the language proper. I understand lisp has had a rough go because there wasn't enough standardisation of libraries, but on the other hand, I think languages like Java went overboard.

My point, I guess, is that I find haskell to be easy and efficient to develop applications with. It is quite practical. Also, the academic research that goes in to Haskell continues to make it more practical. I, for one, do not want the spirit of Haskell to change just to make it how people think it would be useful in the comercial world. It's current spirit makes it very useful and rewarding.

Seconded! I especially agree on the following points: - Haskell is useful for practical, commercial purposes NOW - Commercial development gets substantial benefits from academic research and the "academic flavour" of Haskell. If you want a less "academic" language, there are so many to choose from. Personally, I am sometimes a bit distressed by all those big demands articulated by newcomers to Haskell world, perhaps because most of the time these are things completely unneccesary for me (a non-academic programmer). Please have the humility to take some time to learn Haskell more, and then *maybe* you will appreciate the way some things are done. Best regards Tomasz

Andy Georges schrieb:

...

one particular thing that we still lack is something like book "Haskell in real world"

We need a 'Dive into Haskell' book.

That's for later. Getting those little annoyances out of the way (like those described on defmacro) is far more important. What you need so that non-experts can get their feet wet are: * A compiler. [FIXED] * Libraries for the application programmer. [MOSTLY FIXED] * The relevant information is available. [FIXED, I think] * Things work "out of the box". [MOSTLY FIXED] * It's easy to find the relevant information. [OPEN] * A "Haskell for Dummies" book. Haskell is already 99% there. However, a dummies book would be premature - unless you really expect that the other items will be fully fixed by the time the book is out. Regards, Jo

Bulat Ziganshin schrieb:

Hello Joachim,

Monday, December 11, 2006, 12:01:42 PM, you wrote:

...

...

...

one particular thing that we still lack is something like book "Haskell in real world" We need a 'Dive into Haskell' book.

...

* It's easy to find the relevant information. [OPEN]

what i mean is to fix this problem. there is lot of Haskell information that is spread over the air

Actually it's an overly difficult task, and I see this being addressed. Now that the information is available - I'm under the impression that only recently the various bits and pieces have come into existence or at least got an audience. I'm seeing a *lot* of "finishing touches" work in progress. (MissingH reorganisation, "How to write my first Haskell program" wiki page.) What I find even more encouraging is that this work is welcomed. These activities are among the major reasons why I'm finally prepared to get my feet wet with Haskell after years of interested watching. I'll probably fire off a set of newbie questions for my project, though it might still take a few days to get them organized well enough to do that (and to find the time for setting up the text). Regards, Jo

Joachim Durchholz wrote:

These activities are among the major reasons why I'm finally prepared to get my feet wet with Haskell after years of interested watching. I'll probably fire off a set of newbie questions for my project, though it might still take a few days to get them organized well enough to do that (and to find the time for setting up the text).

Hi Jo! Welcome to the club. (I think I did my share, now and then, on c.l.f to keep up your interest... ;-) Cheers Ben

Bulat Ziganshin wrote:

one particular thing that we still lack is something like book "Haskell in real world"

How about: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Applications-Functional-Programming-Colin-Runciman/dp/1857283775/sr=1-16/qid=1166024994/ref=sr_1_16/202-8679714-4706263?ie=UTF8&s=books Applications of Functional Programming (Hardcover) by Colin Runciman (Editor), David Wakeling (Editor) Routledge, 1995. Synopsis This book is unique in showcasing real non-trivial applications of functional programming using the Haskell language. It presents state-of-the-art work from the FLARE project and will be an invaluable resource for advanced study, research and implementation. The applications covered in the book range from workforce management and graphical design to computational fluid dynamics. Regards, Malcolm