Why I Support the Haskell Foundation | Hacker News Reader

Why I Support the Haskell Foundation

cdsmithus.medium.com

121 pointscdsmith37 comments

> I’ve lost count of the stories I have heard from others about how our community welcomed them when they needed a friend, felt alienated and alone, doubted themselves, or felt like they couldn’t make it in the world.

Wow, I never thought a programming language community can help people overcome negative feelings. These storeis are really nice.

Much like novels and poetry, math and programming have sincerely contributed to my happiness.

It is not that I can't socialize or don't have friends, it's just that I don't like what most people do (like watching sports, and talking about uninteresting things, etc.) And save some specific people, I feel burned out after spending time with other people. I am known to many as an extremely sociable, and friendly person. I just don't like it.

On top of that, being heretically progressive (truly progressive, e.g. criticizing and disliking all religions and all patriarchy- Christian, Islamic, and Hindu- not toeing the modern woke liberal agenda), I cannot freely express myself except in front of my parents, SO, and about two friends.

In such a life, programming brings immense bliss. I profoundly enjoy poetry, and novels, but they are something you are consuming. I love to create things, modify and change things.

Programming, whether in microcontrollers for hobby, or solving business problems with innovative solutions, or solving project Euler problems, I feel immense joy. If programming did not exist, my life would have been significantly worse.

Why can't FOSS projects get structural support from governments, the way science is funded?

Science is funded by money from projects. You write a project proposal and apply for funding. Isn't ghc funded by money from Glasgow University or something like that?

Some contributors are, but Simon PJ is at Microsoft Research and Simon Marlow used to be too (in case you were wondering where F# came from).

Also, funding projects not people is a relatively recent notion; e.g. most fundamental physics breakthroughs of the 20th century were done by people who didn’t have to write grant applications.

Exactly - and the amount of effort this consumes is immense. You end up with grant-writing and paper-publishing institutions where the actual advance of knowledge is squeezed between the two.

But what is the alternative? You need a generic way of deciding who gets how much money and I don't see another way except for the whole project application process. The only alternative is someone gives money to things he likes... Companies can afford that but the public sector cannot because it is ripe for corruption.

There are companies who can do the grant-writing for you.

> Science is funded by money from projects.

Yes, FOSS projects are projects too? Or use subprojects if you need more funding for the same project?

You're going in a dangerously socialist direction here. Let the free market sort it out, and may the best man (billionaire) win. We get innovation & progress that way.

Because FOSS development and bureaucracy don't match, I think. Applying for grants is a huge administrative burden (both to acquire and to document the spending) so only the largest projects have enough organizational overhead to justify spending effort on it.

Article mentioned Apple with their own mainstream language, I suppose Swift. But it's far from being mainstream, didn't gain the desired attention and failed miserably with TensorFlow. Thus, it's a niche language making no sense outside of the Apple ecosystem. Is not a serious contender to Haskell.

Swift TensorFlow wasn't an Apple thing, I think. And it never made sense in the first place ...

Swift is mainstream in Apple ecosystem, like VB (and C# before dotnet went open source) was in MS ecosystem back in the day. I'm not questioning Haskell influence and importance, but, what you think, how many developers use Swift and get paid to work in Swift every day, compared to Haskell developers?

I would love to know some actual numbers. It does seem like Swift adoption on server/Linux by people who aren't already Mac/iOS developers is horrendously low.

While my preferred languages are Common Lisp, Clojure, Haskell, and Scheme, I must say that Swift is pretty nice.

Apple’s supplied deep learning models are useful and easy to use, and compiling on an IPad Pro or M1 Mac is fast, even with the type inferencing. Right now I am slogging through a 50 hour SwiftUI 2 class.

I am disappointed that TensorFlow for Swift has been mothballed, but Julia and Python are probably much better options for deep learning. BTW, Julia is a fairly good general purpose language also. I have played with little bits of Julia code for text manipulation, REST, SPARQL queries, etc.

EDIT: since this is a Haskell thread, pardon the plug: you can grab a free copy of my Haskell book at https://markwatson.com

Swift is mainstream on the context of Apple ecosystem.

Not everyone cares about cross platform.

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