klrr

I've been into computers since I was 9 years old as well, and I was interested in anything electrical before that. My point is that most here (on HN at least) have started out early, running around bragging about is just silly in my opinion. It also is a bit discouraging for people who have not started out yet. I remember thinking I had to give programming up since I did not know that awesome language X at age Y. When I learnt some high-level concept people said learn C, when I learnt some low-level concept people said learn Haskell. Later in life I understood that I had actually achieved to learn many advanced concepts, which will be useful for my entire life. It just was disturbing to me personally (and I think many others) who had very low confidence back then.

"It started at the age of five"

Come'on, you don't even have proper memory at that age. And then "to figure out how it worked", sure. We all dissected electronics when we were young, but that is hardly what I would call hacking. I don't get people's obbsession with bragging about how early they start. I guess it's since most hackers (pg, esr, Linus etc.) have these stories how early they start and somehow people think they need to do so to become great programmers (or hackers). It's not all bad though, I remember how motivating it was reading about those stories at young age.

Learning functional programming is not trivial, especially if you come from the imperative paradigm. Haskell was my first language and I still struggled not to think procedurally in the beginning , and the type-checker refused almost all of my programs. But after a while you start to get less and less type errors, and soon types will be your friend and guide you when writing programs.

I have to say though; static types itself doesn't prevent bugs, they only prevent common errors. But if you got an expressive type system like Haskell (or OCaml etc.) you can write well-typed programs. A great example is Yesod[0], which is a web framework completely designed around being well-typed.

0. http://www.yesodweb.com/

EDIT: Okey, "well-typed" may not be the right term. TAPL calls every program that pass the type-checker well-typed so what I meant is programming written type-safe.

Okey, this is a question to the parent of the comment I reply to. (I couldn't reply to tel for some reason).

Do you have any example were the documentation available is only scientific or technical papers? I've been learning Haskell for a year now, and even though I've read some papers due to interest I've never felt like it was the only form of documentation.

After reading /r/gamedev on Flappy Bird I got quite disgusted by their community. I hope doesn't represent the whole game development community. They seriously compared Flappy Bird to more in-depth games and took its success as some kind of threat without even realizing that short and addictive entertainment does sell. You can't compare Flappy Birds to "bigger" games, it just doesn't make sense. Flappy Birds is an amazing game in its own right.

Is there any IRC channel for this project?

I think you underestimate the intellect of younger people. Teach them that there is shady stuff on the internet and to avoid it rather than restricting them. Restricting them will just make them more curious anyway.

That would be a really good feature, HN has gone quite clutter the past year.

Here is a similar game: http://www.hedgewars.org/

So you are enabled to focus wholly since you are used to its syntax?

You know Id Software open sourced many of their engines[0] and that have spawned tons of derived works[1].

0. https://github.com/id-Software 1. http://en.whttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Quake_-_family_...

That reminds me of the language Z. http://chrisdone.com/z/

Does it compile code on the iPad or does it use some online API like the other Haskell programs on the Apple App Store?

I'm a bit skeptical if the term FRP really applies here. The usual FRP programs are written so that you first define a few primitive signals (I use the term signal for the sake of this thread being about Elm) and then use them together with a set of combinators to build up a entire signal network that defines the program. In Elm you already have the primitives and then just step state like you would do in a FP language normally.

Elm is theoretically classic FRP with a option of a arrow interface, but the combinators for building signal networks is not provided by defult. Therefore I feel its a bit unfair to call it FRP and not having a prefix explaining that its a derivitive there of.

Google provide them users.

As someone who only got experience in Haskell I have to ask the same thing. Why should I use X OOP language when I can write almost anything in Haskell with ease? I tried learn programming in C and Python and even the beginner language Scheme, still I did not get programming until I learnt Haskell. Code shouldn't be abstracted as real world objects becuase code is instruction not something concrete you can touch, its information. Abstracting it using a more mathematical approuch very much makes sense and let even a beginner be able to handle quite complex problems.

Plans on porting to other systems?

If I run bleeding-edge packages I want atomic updates (if install fail it won't change the state of the rest of the system) and support for roll-back (if a package is unstable I can easily go back one version without ruining the dependency tree for all other packages).

Could not agree more, although I dislike Arch. The reason I do is since it's extremely unsafe, I would want something as bleeding edge as Arch but with a purely functional package manager like Nix or GNU Guix. (I know you can install Nix on Arch but then I will still have to use Nixpkg repo.)

Not sure if it's related (not a web developer), but here it is anyway: http://nixos.org/~eelco/mod_haskell/

Sorry, actually thought you were trolling when you first said only math major use it and then made it sound like the syntax was the reason for.

The core points in your criticism is known though, and basically apply to any other language. Most language with new concepts and new syntax will be difficult to learn if you already are used to another language. Especially if the language is almost the opposite of the one you learn. Imperative language are about writing how and writing functionally is about writing what. Widely different mindset is needed to accomplish many tasks. Recursion being one thing, monadic computation being another. One thing many people coming from OOP to Haskell have a hard time with is that they write new classes when what they really want is new datatypes.

In the end you win when you've learnt a language such as Haskell though, cause even if you won't write production code in it you will learn a lot of useful practices you can apply to everyday programming. Also you will have a new language to write your side projects in. ;)

Since no one have pointed out yet, I take the opportunity to recommend FPComplete.

It's a new company focusing on this exact problem. They offer tools like an IDE and deployment model. You can just sign-up on their website and start coding directly, you don't need to mess with setting things up. They also got School of Haskell which is a central place of really great tutorials ranging from tutorials on developing web apps to category theory stuff.

Check them out: https://www.fpcomplete.com/

Clearly a troll, down-vote and move along.

So you claim he learnt a language and a new technology quickly, solely because he uses an IDE? I doubt so...

The Norvig quote sounds more reasonable.

Unity provides best UX on Linux so far, or have other desktops catched on? Last time I checked Cinnamon (tried it on Arch Linux though) and Gnome Shell both lacked the depth of design compared to Unity.

Similar marketing strategy as of FPComplete. Benefits community and on same time advertises the company.

What does this provides me over Ubuntu?

I hope Haskell Prime solves this. In Haskell String is literally a list of characters. This causes some overhead and leads to bad performance. Of course we got Text and for binary data you can use ByteString, but it's a bit of pain compared to having a real string type by default.

While it's true that you can't really pipe programs conveniently yet it sure supports composition with all functions as you suggest. Just wanted to note in case that was what the comment above was thinking about. Except that I pretty much agree with you, current top comment is crap.

Might note this was "whipped this up in a few hours". I suspect this is just an experiment. But I think this might evolve into something serious, lots of interest was expressed in /r/haskell.

On a serious side note, it doesn't need pipes since the shell utilities are wrapped as function which are composable in Haskell.