
Leaving Microsoft - protothomas
http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2012-November/023566.html
======
smenyp
FYI, Simon Marlow is incredibly big in the Haskell community and is the
leading expert in Multi core parallelism via STMs in Haskell. Some of the work
he has done for the GHC compiler is frankly fantastic.

This is incredibly big news in the Haskell world. The FP community is starting
to break boundaries with the industry in the last 5 years with Clojure (and
Scala's functional support).

Currently, FB seems to use haskell only for basic lexing and parsing[1]. It
would be tremendous to see them using it at FB scale. I think there's going to
be gain for both parties - For FB, the publicity and hacker outreach, and
Haskell - industrial reliability.

[1]: <http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_industry>

~~~
eta_carinae
> The FP community is starting to break boundaries with the industry in the
> last 5 years with Clojure (and Scala's functional support).

There is very little evidence of that. Do a search for Scala, Clojure or
Haskell on the main indicator web sites (job boards, StackOverflow, TIOBE,
indeed.com, etc...) and you'll find they are as insignificant today as they
were five years ago compared to the mainstream languages.

~~~
smenyp
Anecdotally (n=1, of course) I have seen and heard tremendous resistance to
clisp in the industry I work in 5 years ago. Now, clojure and Scala are being
adopted and recommended by even conservative PMs and architects.

The choices are way more today (Almost a tautology given old choices don't
really vanish into thin air) and on more reliable platforms with tried and
tested libraries.

anyway the spirit with which i meant that statement was that it is far easier
to convince "senior management" and others with power to let stuff be done in
clojure / Scala than it was to convince them about ml or clisp five years ago.

And I am not even talking about "ivory tower Haskell" (which i love using).

(Don't know enough about erlang / f# to comment).

~~~
pjmlp
My new recent project is in .NET and I happily using all functional like
features C# 4.0 offers.

------
dbaupp
It should be made clear in the title that Haskell isn't leaving MS, rather it
is one of the lead developers of GHC, Simon Marlow.

~~~
bbotond
Agreed. It should be "GHC Developer Leaving Microsoft".

~~~
pyre
It's the subject of the mailing list message (the [Haskell] being the mailing
list subject prefix). I was able to piece together what it meant, but I know
that a couple of key people for ghc work for Microsoft Research. I agree in
general that it's confusing, but it's not like this is the subject of blog
post that was poorly chosen. The 'real' subject is just "Leaving Microsoft".

~~~
jeremyjh
And how would we know that before we click on the link bait?

~~~
ben0x539
Complain to the policy or machinery against editorializing titles that makes
every submission title converge towards the <title> on the linked page.

------
Yoric
Wow, talk about a shock. I hope that this is good news for functional
programming and the programming language community, rather than just good news
for Facebook.

------
mej10
Does this mean that Facebook is using Haskell more these days?

~~~
davidw
Nah, it means that Simon Marlow harbored a latent desire to go code in PHP.

~~~
ygra
Facebook is about equally PHP and C++ these days.

~~~
amackera
This really boggles my mind. Facebook's stack is intriguing.

------
jlouis
This may be either disastrous or magnificent. I think it may end up being the
latter.

------
mattquiros
This email was sent yesterday, how come it's in Courier New?

------
Narretz
GHC? Great Haskell Collider?

~~~
venomsnake
Well the strong type system ensures that no collisions are possible. GHC is
quite the software gem. I love haskell more and more. Everything that is so
simple to write, has no right of being so fast.

~~~
jeremyjh
I agree. The type inference is a beautiful thing. I had started a project in
Scala and I'm finding it hard to stay interested when Haskell is so much more
interesting to me. But Scala is a LOT more practical for my project. :(

~~~
jheriko
i dunno i've seen type inference create horrible to debug situations -
although mainly where it has been shoehorned into to C++11 and used with
templates and auto to create code that fails silently doing nothing when a
parameter has the wrong type

~~~
exfalso
C++ "type inference" has nothing to do with actual type inference. Types in
functional programming languages have a proper academic mathematical
foundation, specifically in formal logic. This is in sharp contrast to C++,
where it was added as a convenience to avoid specifying certain template
parameters. And with so many C++ "features", this one adds yet more ambiguity
to the language.

------
jheriko
i'm assuming this guy has done real world work before? the idea of a
compiler/language lead programmer effectively having lived in academia is
terrifying on many levels.

best of luck to him at any rate. haskell and ghc are a cool language and
compiler combo, one i have enjoyed for recreational programming time and time
again.

~~~
gclaramunt
err... do you know that (since 1.4 IIRC) the java compiler is the one written
by Martin Odersky?

~~~
pjmlp
Wasn't 1.5?

Martin's work was related to generics, which got introduced in 1.5.

~~~
fhars
It was 1.3, but the interesting features were disabled in production builds
until 1.5,
[http://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se7/html/jls-0-prefa...](http://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se7/html/jls-0-preface3.html)

~~~
pjmlp
Thanks for the clarification.

