[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] Haskell Weekly News: March 12, 2007

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

ithika:
> Quoth Conrad Parker, nevermore,
> > 
> > Besides, <tshirt>If it's not open source, it's not computer
> > science</tshirt>. Science demands repeatable results, computer science
> > demands literate programming. The solution is not to shy away from
> > including code, or else the IP lawyers have won, science is banned and
> > we get plunged into another Dark Age.
> 
> I'm glad some people agree. I've been reading the reddit comments for
> that blog post with a mixture of car-crash fascination and horror, where
> the prevailing opinions are a mixture of:
> 
> * computer scientists can't program, duh!
> * computer scientists aren't in academia for the advancement of
>   knowledge, it's all about getting their name known
> * you just want to ride on the coat-tails of other people's brilliance;
>   or, you're too lazy/stupid to do the work yourself
> * if you can't recreate it from the description in the paper then it
>   shouldn't have been published
> 
> The final point is the only one with any merit at all, and only then in
> an ideal world. High level papers are not simple to translate into code,
> even if the resulting code is quite simple. (How long did it take for
> the monad to make it into programming?)
> 
> It's sad that there's such a prevailing culture of anti-intellectualism
> even in computer science/software engineering. So I'd like to take the
> opportunity to thank all the exciting academic work that gets published
> with code that I can read (even better when they are mixed in one
> literate document). And also all those contributors to The Monad Reader,
> who help to bridge that gap for the rest of us.

I too read the comments with a sense of frustration.

It is encouraging, somewhat, that in the original article, the Haskell
paper-writing community was actually singled out as one that does tend
to operate in an open source manner, and to actually produce code.

Free the lambdas!

-- Don