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Turbo Haskell

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160 pointspjmlp37 comments

Coincidentally, the author has just been interviewed on the Haskell Interlude podcast:

Only tangentially related, but I'm reminded of Frege[0], a Haskell dialect for the JVM that I stumbled across at one point and thought looked really cool.... I see recent commits but the releases are all really old, so I can't tell what the state of the project is.

[0] https://github.com/frege/frege

I hadn't thought of Fregue in some years! I helped them with their logo and some smaller issues back in the time. I will check out the latest commits to see what's being updated (hopefully not only dependabot:) ).

I was expecting some Turbo Vision based TUI IDE.

The polyglot FFI feature (thanks to GraalVM) might be very useful for implementing "functional core, imperative shell" style designs.

FYI the article links a discussion on Reddit, which has answers for several comments made here.

For convenience, here's that Reddit thread

https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1wu24oe/turbo_hask...

now that there's all the rage about agentic coding - & languages don't matter - why r people not migrating to more less error prone languages like Haskell ?

Agents write code in popular languages better.

Because languages don’t matter so why bother.

like Turbo Pascal?

No it's a not blue TUI IDE but a Haskell on JVM. Author wasted that concept :|

And it has to weigh in under 1 MB and have sub-second compilation times.

Since there is MicroHS Haskell compiler in 0.5 MB space nothing is stopping people to wire it together with TurboVision/ncurses. Apart from that the name is taken now.

Part of the name was a joke about people often mishearing Haskell as Pascal, Ed told me a couple of years ago. I think it might have been at ZuriHac back when it was at Google Zurich, so 2016-ish?

I read it as "Turbo Hascal"

You are not alone.

I think the other part of the name is a cannabis joke.

Odd that the FFI list didn't include Java given the JVM target. Typo or oversight?

I believe it's just not FFI towards Java byte code, since it's the "native".

But of course as a Truffle language it gets "free" java interop

Odd — server can't be found

> ...that runs Haskell on the JVM.

Why not call it Jaskell then?

I’d have gone with Hava.

Shorter is better.

Avast blocks the site from being loaded.

It's a Haskell to JVM compiler repurposing some parts of GHC. Pretty cute but evokes "why?".

The proper rejoinder to which is "why not?"

around 4k commits in a week.

i am not sure anyone actually understands what is going on under the hood of the project. looks like average slop.

>> Exactly a week ago (as a joke), I started writing THC,

you? i hope you have read at least something of what your agent wrote about the project.

Edward Kmett is a very respected Haskell developer.

i see, but my statement does not become false because of it. his agent pushes several commits an hour in a continuous loop, meaning this respected developer is not involved in the process at all.

The article gives a link to the discussion on Reddit. In it, Edward says "I actually did pretty much gave up sleep for a week. That said there are a few hour stretches here and there where I leave it on mostly cleanup tasks and doze off. you can find a couple of 2-3 hour breaks where it got hung up on approval while I was lights out. "

Sit down

I briefly worked with him personally. He is 1. a perfectionist and 2. equipped with the intellectual and programming firepower to not get stuck in the resulting paralysis that a lot of people get stuck in but blast through tasks that should be impossible to do at all, let alone with a high degree of quality, successfully, through sheer intellectual firepower. The end result is that he is well known for already having not just one incredible Haskell library, but a number of them.

I can promise you he will not produce and release "slop". He would be an order of magnitude more offended at the idea than you are, I'd imagine.

in that case it is truly amazing, because I have never seen anyone with current ai capable of being so productive and truly understanding what they are putting out.

Kmett is a legend in Haskell. He writes and maintains tens of libraries - since the 2000s. Even before LLMs, Kmett had an output like most of us can do only with LLMs. Seriously, the guy is a coding machine.

> looks like average slop.

How can you tell?

It's a fun project without bad intentions. Crucify someone else for using AI. Your comment serves only selfish purposes.

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