

Simon Peyton-Jones - A Taste of Haskell  - ahmicro
http://ontwik.com/haskell/simon-peyton-jones-a-taste-of-haskell/

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tomstuart
I just never get tired of watching SPJ talk. He has an amazing ability to
explain complex ideas in a meaningful way, not to mention his obvious natural
enthusiasm for the subject.

It's also great to attend any talk where he's in the audience, because he
always finds a way to ask questions which intentionally create opportunities
for the speaker to look better by diving off into some interesting subtopic or
area of technical detail that they've overlooked. A real talent.

~~~
ekidd
SPJ also writes amazing papers. He always has a novel, practical idea, and he
explains it clearly. For example, here's a paper he co-authored on Software
Transactional Memory in Haskell:

[http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/simonpj/papers...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/simonpj/papers/stm/stm.pdf)

Notice the care taken to explain why STM is important, and its advantages over
traditional locking (ease of use and composability). There's also two great
new theoretical tidbits in this paper, the 'retry' and 'orElse' operators,
which significantly expand the power of STM.

SPJ's good example has filtered throughout most of the Haskell community by
now. I love programming in Haskell because it gives me an excuse to read these
really cool papers (and it stretches my brain until I understand them).

~~~
eru
Yes, Haskell's such an awesome language only partly because of the cool
technology. The community and its leaders are the real secret sauce.

------
baguasquirrel
This was great. I just wished that more in-depth articles like this one would
rise to the top just as much.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2429082>

ML may have lost the war, but from an academic and educational standpoint,
folks in the ML community still have a lot to bring to the table.

~~~
gaius
Reports of ML's demise are somewhat premature. Now we call it F#...

~~~
grav1tas
Isn't that kinda like saying the C language still lives on in the form of
Java?

~~~
Dn_Ab
Well, no. Because the distance, especially the idiomatic distance, between C
and Java is much more than the distance between F# and Ocaml. The core
languages of both are essentially equivalent. Ocaml and F# have diverged a
fair bit in their fringes/exotic features (I can go into this in more detail)
but if the bulk of your code use the more humdrum features then going between
the two is trivial.

A more apt analogy would be to consider two languages that extend C in
different ways but for which the core of C can be used in both with almost no
modification (D & C++?). I suppose a python/jython/ironpython comparison would
be more accurate.

p.s. with respect to grandparent, I don't subscribe to the philosophy of
casting everything in terms of winner take all wars.

------
rbanffy
"Haskell is the world's leading purely functional programming language"

Why do people have to write stuff like this? What is "leading" and why would
that be important?

And, BTW, I am quite sure there is a lot more Erlang code running on phone
centrals around the planet than Haskell code.

~~~
gaius
Haskell is the language in which the lion's share of pure functional
programming language research is done. So it is "leading" in the sense of
"being the first place new ideas are tried".

~~~
dons
> Haskell is the language in which the lion's share

But also more popular on:

* Tiobe; GitHub; Reddit; Transparent Language Rankings; IRC; Workshop size; Number of libraries...

Community matters.

