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Comment by jackpirate | Hacker News Reader

Hi everyone, author of HLearn here :)

This is a bit awkward for me as I've paused the development of HLearn and emphatically do not recommend anyone use it. The main problem is that Haskell (which I otherwise love) has poor support for numerical computing. I've tried developing an alternative standard library to improve the situation (https://github.com/mikeizbicki/subhask), but Haskell's type system isn't yet powerful enough to do what I want. I'm sure the type system will have the needed features in 5-10 years, and I'd rather wait and do it right.

If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.

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Let me put Mike's comment into what I think is its proper context. "Poor support for numerical computing" really means "relative to Mike's dream, which is not actually realisable by any programming language today" :-)

Most readers seem to be misinterpreting Mike as anchoring off other popular programming languages of today, whereas he's looking for language features for which there's (a) no consensus that they'll actually be good when they exist, and (b) don't yet exist. (I'm highly skeptical of dependently typed programming.)

I think that there's a case to be made that numeric programming in Haskell, relative to the state of the art of today rather than the year 2100, really isn't so great – but my concerns are very different than Mike's, and revolve around libraries rather than type system features.

Source: have done a bit of Haskell in my day.

You're 95% correct about my view.

I do think that matlab/python are a bit better numerical programming languages than Haskell as-is, but only marginally. This is not just due to the library ecosystem, but also because I think that dynamic languages really are better than the best Haskell2010/GHC8.2 library theoretically possible. There are just some things that the existing type system makes a bit more awkward.

That's kind of sad that you've given up on this project. I visited this thread to comment that I'm working on a similar project, but for Swi-Prolog (a statistical NLP module - it's my own initiative and about a month away from sharing with the world).

I think it's a big shame that traditional AI and computer-sciency languages like Haskell and Prolog have lagged so far behind the mainstream ones in terms of machine learning and as machine learning gets more popular I'm worried this will cause them to fall by the wayside even more than they have already.

What is it that's making Haskell bad at numerical computing? I would have thought it's not much worse than e.g. Julia or Python but even if it is, I always figured there's other benefits to programming in Haskell- otherwise we'd all be geeking over FORTRAN, I guess.

With Prolog the big issue is that statistical AI algorithms tend to go a lot faster with mutable, indexable data structures and those don't have a lot of support in Prolog. What is it that's really bothering you with Haskell? Could you give an example?

[Note: I'm a Haskell noob, but I should be able to handle code examples]

> Haskell's type system isn't yet powerful enough to do what I want.

What still needs to be done? Does Idris have enough of the power that you need?

I've not used Idris too much, so I can't say for sure. My guess is that the answer is that it could do everything I want type-system-wise, but there are things I want outside of the type sytem that I don't think it could do.

For example, I want the compiler to automatically rewrite my code to be much more efficient and numerically stable (see the HerbiePlugin to the GHC compiler which goes this https://github.com/mikeizbicki/HerbiePlugin). My understanding is that the Idris compiler gets much less engineering work done on it (outside of the type system), and so getting efficient running code will be too difficult.

I think it's pretty interesting considering the level of optimization that Hlearn has that the author mentions the poor support for numerical computing. I have two questions. 1. Which are the things that Haskell is missing for numerical computing. Is it something related to the language standard or to the compiler? 2. I have read the info for SubHask but I haven't got enough context to really understand why the alternative Prelude might help with numerical computing. Could you explain it a bit more, please?

It's common in machine learning to define a parameter space $\Theta$ that is a subset of Euclidean space with a number of constraints. For a simple example, $Theta$ could be an elipse embedded in $R^2$. In existing Haskell, it is easy to make $R^2$ correspond to a a type, and then do automatic differentiation (i.e. backpropagation) over the space to learn the model. If, however, I want to learn over $\Theta$ instead, then I need to completely rewrite all my code. In my ideal language, it would be easy to define complex types like $\Theta$ that are subtypes of $\R^2$, and have all my existing code automatically work on this constrained parameter space.

I am learning Haskell. Can you explain why you think Haskell has poor support for numerical computing?

See bos's comment above. It's mostly just poor relative to what I wish it had. You can see the subhask library for a small taste of what I wish it had.

What are you using instead?

Everything (octave, python, julia, c++, various probabalistic programming langugaes) depending on the task and my mood.

Thanks and go UCR: http://positron.ucr.edu/ I bet doing ML in this context would be fun...

I remember repa being a pretty awkward experience when I tried it out

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