No he didn't. He took the time to learn ocaml.
>Obviously you can write fast code in Haskell, but that is not the same as it being easy.
The closest thing to evidence I can find suggests that it is no more difficult to write fast code in haskell:
http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/benchmark.php?te...
Not before writing his initial benchmarks, which is what we're talking about.
> The closest thing to evidence I can find suggests that it is no more difficult to write fast code in haskell:
> http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/benchmark.php?te....
That measures ridiculous highly tuned implementations of the benchmarks, often written by the creators of the languages themselves. It contains absolutely no evidence of how hard it is to write fast programs in a language.
Besides, I'm pretty sure citing the language shoot-out is an automatic disqualification in any argument about language speed.
I certainly tried to treat them equally. If I cut-and-pasted from the web more often for the Haskell, it's because I got stuck more often.
For example, I didn't need to search the web for how to read argv[0] in OCaml. It's just Sys.argv.(0). Easy. Would you really expect a beginner to figure out the Haskell version on their own?
https://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/users_guide/rel...
The second link is to Environment.hs, which would have solved my problem, if I'd known what I was looking for. I think I'd have just clicked Back when I saw it was library source code, though.
The third link is http://hackage.haskell.org/package/system-argv0-0.1 - which says "Use this instead of System.Environment.getProgName if you want the full path, and not just the last component."
(note: technically, my code was still the correct solution, since 0install targets Ubuntu 12.04, but yes ideally I would have found that newer versions did support it more simply)
Yes, he did. Try talking to him.
>That measures ridiculous highly tuned implementations of the benchmarks
So, fast code. Which is what is at question.
>It contains absolutely no evidence of how hard it is to write fast programs in a language.
There is both lines of code, and actually looking at the code itself. Both of which make it appear that writing fast code is no more difficult in haskell than in ocaml.
>I'm pretty sure citing the language shoot-out is an automatic disqualification in any argument about language speed.
I'm pretty sure the language shoot-out is of greater value as evidence than personal anecdote is.
No the question is about whether fast code is easy to write, if it has to be highly tuned then it is not easy to write.
> I'm pretty sure the language shoot-out is of greater value as evidence than personal anecdote is.
Actually, I think that the shoot-out causes a lot of harm to people's attempts to understand whether a language is fast or not.
When people ask: "Is language X fast?" what they mean is "if I write my programs in it will they be fast". They do not mean "is the highly tuned code of an expert fast".
The question of whether a language is fast is about whether code written in the natural idioms of the language is fast, not about whether you can coerce the compiler into producing the precise assembly code you are aiming for. If you are going to do that you might as well write the assembly code directly and call it using an FFI. Many implementations on the shoot-out bare no resemblance to the code people naturally write in those languages.
The fact that this code is fast tells you nothing about whether idiomatic Haskell is fast. wrong evidence < no evidence.
The question was about difficulty, not a subjective idea of what idiomatic code looks like. Are you seriously claiming that the average haskell example there is more difficult to write than the average ocaml example? If so, just say that. Trying to redirect the discussion back to your subjective preferences is not productive.
And `inlinePerformIO` is much more unsafe, because it requires that you do no memory allocation inside it. This property is specific to the Haskell implementation, and is certainly not easy to guarantee.