[Haskell-cafe] Most used functions in hackage

[Rustom Mody]

On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 9:41 PM, Casey Basichis <caseybasichis at gmail.com>wrote:

> That book Mathsemantics sounds like something I should read, would you
> recommend it?
>
>

Well its quite a favourite of mine, if that counts as a recommendation…



> Your point occurred to me the other day when measuring number of downloads
> of whole packages was mentioned as being the ideal measure.
>
> I have more confidence in measuring the contents of the packages
> themselves as creating a Hackage package suggests a competency with the
> language and baseline of sophistication.
>
> My thought was the best measure might be the count of functions across all
> packages, where an included function in any individual package would only
> be counted once per package.
>
> In this sense, map and fold would still likely be towards the top, but
> that is as it should be.
>
> But it seems there are many measures that would be useful, like the
> percentage of functions from a package that tend to get used in the same
> project - do people nit pick particular functions from a specific package
> or does the package use tend to require the use of all of its functions in
> every project the package is used in.
>
> I'd love to hear some thoughts on this as I generally don't know where to
> begin in solving these sorts of problems and would like to know more about
> those methods in general.
>
>
Well… it seems to be a good idea to back off from here a bit and ask how we
came here.
You want to learn haskell  for which you want to pinpoint the 'most' used
functions.
Lets leave aside the question that 'most' may be harder to specify than we
may first imagine.

Instead lets make a map (functor?) from learning the programming language
Haskell to learning the natural language English.
So I dont know English (and yeah there are Godelian anomalies in that
statement) and I gather that vocabulary is a key to mastering the language.
Now Webster is a bit too fat to cram up as a whole so I decide to isolate
the 5000 most used English words.
Do you think my English mastery will be improved that way?
Surely Webster had a bigger vocabulary than Shakespeare.
Do you think Webster knew English better than Shakespeare?
[You can of course replace Shakespeare to whoever happens to take your
fancy]

IOW mastering the paradigm is more important than the details.

Now its important to get that the paradigm cannot be caught in any
single-point sloganeering such as:
"Functional programming is programming without side-effects"
"Haskell is syntactically sugared lambda calculus"
"The key feature of Haskell is its sexy type magic"

Nevertheless its also true that 'paradigm' consists of far fewer elements
than 'the 500 most used functions.'

I have a couple of pages on my blog:
http://blog.languager.org/2012/10/functional-programming-lost-booty.html
gives a few of the basics that FPers should know (IMHO) before going to
advanced stuff. I should mention that it was written it because Haskell is
becoming increasingly hard for beginners with the focus on 'type-magic' is
overshadowing the basics. [In any case after 25 years of teaching, I am
finding it harder and harder to teach] If you have crossed over the basic
stage it may not be much use to you :-)

There is also
http://blog.languager.org/2011/02/cs-education-is-fat-and-weak-1.html and
sequel
which is more of a grumble about CS education than about FP/Haskell per se.
Still, an undercurrent of that grumble is that much of the nonsense of CS
education is because FP has not become mainstream soon enough.
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