Comment by caughtexception | Hacker News Reader

Comment by caughtexception | Hacker News Reader

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caughtexception

> Learn Haskell properly and then see for yourself why "hybrids" are a waste of time.

/rant

Getting tired of puritans. You people are selling functional programming on the basis of "ideology", not merits.

Can the following be done in Haskell ?

* A Real Operating System.

* GPU programming.

* Embedded programming.

* If you can do all the above, can you replace Verilog ?

* Financial Programming.

  Ocaml is one of the "hybrids". Genetically impure,
  since it has "refs". But they have Jane Street.

* Games worth playing.

  assertion : If all the haskell programmers are put in
  a gulag, they can't come up with a half-decent
  game. 
  
  Nintendo Gameboy Games were written in assembly with 
  goto's. 

  Why don't you guys take a moment and pat yourselves on
  the back ? Hypocrisy-2.0 is probably in the hackage.

Let's say you do all the above, GUI apps, distributed computing, <cool-buzz-word> ... without complains and ending up as a half-decent C++ or 1/10th lisp.

Haskell syntax is garbage.

(Common Lisp has a goto, gee what were they thinking ?)

Mathematicians pride themselves in their rich history of syntax.

Haskellers actually type "Arrow".

"I do consider assignment statements and pointer variables to be among computer science's most valuable treasures."

-- Only an Idiot could say that.

There are a number of toy operating systems written in Haskell. There are not very many "real operating systems" being written in any language, because it is a tremendous undertaking for uncertain value in a space that already has significant players with platform-effect lock in. I don't see why building a "real OS" in Haskell would be much harder than building a "real OS" in other languages, though.

I don't know anything about the state of GPU programming in Haskell, so I'm not going to speak to that.

Regarding embedded, GHC can target some quasi-embedded platforms these days, but it's also possible to write embedded programs in (pardon the overloading) an embedded DSL that can compile to C. Check out the Atom library.

I've heard about some people doing hardware synthesis involving (again) embedded DSLs in Haskell - I don't really know the state of it, but IIRC Conal Elliot gave a talk on some related stuff at one of the Bay Area Haskell meetups.

Jane Street is doing a lot of O'Caml stuff, and that's awesome, but there's definitely a lot of Haskell in finance these days as well (I've seen several job postings, and heard some chatter generally). I don't know which is better represented, or how it compares to other stuff - most big finance places don't talk about what they're doing inside.

Oh, and Haskellers actually type "Arrow" when they're working with a particular generalization of functions. When they're actually working with functions, they type ->.

hypocrisy: the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform; pretense.

"GHC can target some quasi-embedded platforms these days, but it's also possible to write embedded programs in (pardon the overloading) an embedded DSL that can compile to C."

Haskell can't do any useful work without relying on C. Instead of having pride in what C can do, you have invented the following adjectives "hybrid", "mathematical language", "insecure", "impure", "pure".

Either,

1) Stop with the adjectives and get Real.

2) Prove that Haskell can replace C, the "impurity".

The same holds true for mathematical heritage. I would ask mathematicians to use Mathematica, not Haskell.

(I don't consider OCaml to be a part of this debate because OCaml is hybrid and Real, like C++)

You asked some questions, I answered them in an attempt to be helpful. Any conclusions you draw about my personal beliefs are spurious and roughly as well founded as your conclusions generally. For what it's worth, I write a bunch of C and I like C very much. I also like Haskell and have to say you really don't know what you're talking about here. I'm not interested in dealing further with these kinds of ramblings, at this point.

> my personal beliefs

Your and the haskell community's puritan behavior.

> you really don't know what you're talking about here.

Can't Parsec English ? I define the word hypocrisy, from a dictionary no less.

This is nothing but trolling. I wasn't disputing your definition; but you weren't including it as merely an informative point on a random English word. By the pragmatics of English conversation, it was clearly meant as an accusation in this context. Your retreat to defense of the definition, as opposed to any notion of the applicability of the definition or of anything else you've said, is disingenuous. In any event, at this point I am done responding in this thread, whatever else is posted.

For GPU programming - Haskell is a quite good option for running [parts of] your heavy computations on the GPU instead of the CPU, and the language features directly help with that.

And Verilog is quite well entrenched, but if/when it's going to be replaced by something else, currently it seems that it will most likely be a Haskell derivative, something similar to Bluespec perhaps.

But can you clarify your point ? The cause of the rant seems to be for the "hybrids are a waste of time" line, however, most of the examples you provide are things that are currently done by, say, C/C++ but not by the hybrid languages.

Are you claiming that the hybrid languages are (or will be) much more widely used for developing 'A Real Operating System', embedded programming or mass-market games?

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