

SPJ: Escape From the Ivory Tower, Haskell From 1990 to 2011 - johnbender
http://yow.eventer.com/events/1004/talks/1054

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jphackworth
Really interesting slides. As someone who has only briefly played around with
Haskell, I do envy some of its features, particularly the type inference. I
wish there were more languages that could combine the ease of scripting
languages with the maintainability of compile-time typechecking.

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l3b4nn3n
PDF of the presentation: <http://gotocon.com/dl/SPJ-%20keynote.pdf>

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gerggerg
I love this talk. For whatever reason, language history is immensely
interesting to me. I love the haskell class photo from the 90's, I love him
talking about envying features of other languages, I love hearing about
research papers helping bring the language to the next level. I don't know
haskell whatsoever, but now I respect it and find it fascinating.

I would _love_ to see similar talks about other languages.

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zmanji
This is an excellent talk. The presenter has tremendous energy.

~~~
gtani
there's more at channel 9 (also recommend Erik Meijer and Don Syme's, and
those of Wadler adn Ralf Lämmel.

<http://channel9.msdn.com/search?term=peyton+jones>

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jeffdavis
I found the question at the end an interesting one (paraphrased): "would you
be happy if people wrote websites to sell dog food in haskell?"

I was a little disappointed in SPJ's response, actually.

What would make it a bad language for such an application? What would make it
a good language? Would the answer change if you instead wanted to create a
framework for building thousands of web-store applications that were all
similar but a little different?

~~~
tikhonj
As I understood the question, it wasn't really about Haskell's fitness for
that particular purpose but rather a bit of a jab at its theoretical,
researchy nature. I thought it basically meant "How would you feel about your
baby being used in a completely quotidian manner?".

~~~
jeffdavis
I didn't understand it quite that way.

I have been trying to learn haskell for a while, and I like it quite a lot. I
found myself thinking things like "what kind of amazing software could I build
in haskell that I couldn't with any other language". I realized that was the
wrong way to think about it, but perhaps there's something more there. After
such an investment in learning, maybe writing a simple web store seems like an
under-use of the language.

I wonder what things would be like if people _did_ write ordinary applications
in haskell.

~~~
tikhonj
Well, people _do_ write ordinary applications in Haskell (it's not just banks
:)). And the result is surprisingly stable and short programs. A perfect
example here is XMonad--it's a fairly popular tiling window manager with a
good set of features and is something like 2500 lines long (just using wc -l
to count, so don't trust this number :)).

Additionally, Haskell is actually pretty well suited for web programming as
well. There are several frameworks which make writing server-side code easy
and have very good performance; the two most popular ones seems to be Snap[1]
and Yesod[2]. The combination of expresiveness and performance Haskell offers
server-side is very good--C++ may be faster but is uglier, Ruby and friends
may be as expressive but are slower.

[1]: <http://snapframework.com/> [2]: <http://www.yesodweb.com/>

So in all, Haskell is a good way to write "ordinary applications".

~~~
jeffdavis
I wasn't talking about the suitability at all. I'm still learning so I can't
comment on that, but it seems fine so far.

Maybe another way of thinking about it is: I wonder what it would be like when
haskell gets to the point that an application written in haskell is distinct
or ordinary because of what it does, not because it's written in haskell.

And that kind of goes back to the question during the talk: there's nothing
distinctive about a website that sells dog food, so if people start choosing
haskell for that kind of thing, that would be a turning point.

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CJefferson
I have only looked at the slides. This looks like an interesting overview of
Haskell, but, like most functional programming talks I see seems to think the
rest of us really want to be using functional programming.

Notice the slides that thinks the connection between C/Java and Haskell is
that C/Java programmers envy Haskell, and take ideas from it. No envy or ideas
ever flow the other way.

~~~
tikhonj
While there is little envy of Java in Haskell land (is there much Java envy
anywhere?), there is actually a healthy flow of ideas to and _from_ .NET,
particularly C# and (naturally) F#. (Simon Peyton-Jones works at Microsoft
Research, after all.)

For example, I have heard talk of extending Haskell's already nice list
comprehensions with some LINQ features like orderBy.

So while the slides--which are just a backdrop for the talk rather than its
entirety--may imply Haskell is insular like that, the reality is that Haskell
is always happy to take features from other languages.

Finally, I think the idea isn't that everybody _wants_ to use functional
programming languages, but rather that everybody _should_ want to use
functional programming languages ;).

~~~
njs12345
GHC has a feature very similar to LINQ:
[http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.2.1/html/users_guide/synta...](http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.2.1/html/users_guide/syntax-
extns.html#generalised-list-comprehensions)

