[Haskell-cafe] Domain specific error messages

Sat Nov 22 23:01:50 UTC 2014

If the list doesn't mind I'm reposting my reply to Alberto G. Corona in
under the thread "Monads: external questions" as a new message since the
topic has changed enough.

-------------

Hi Alberto,

I've been interested in domain specific error messages for years and I
agree with you that it is one of the major things holding back the utility
of DSLs to novice programmers. This is a shame since one of the touted
benefits of DSLs is that they *can* be used by novices with a minimum of
training, which is simply not true in the presence of error messages that
require detailed knowledge of Haskell to understand.

I'd caution against saying that there is a lack of interest in that ticket
you linked to. It's still a research level problem despite the fact that
some great work has been done on it already. Incidentally, the author of
"Scripting the Type Inference Process" went on to do an entire PhD on the
topic entitled "Top Quality Type Error Messages"[2]. I recently wrote him
an email and he told me that the constraint-based type inference framework
that he used in the thesis, TOP, is available on Hackage [3].

Recently I noticed that this problem is already being worked on in Idris.
See "Reflect on your Mistakes!" [4] and some code on GitHub [5].

Perhaps we can get people interested in this feature again?

Cheers,

Sean
[1] http://www.open.ou.nl/bhr/heeren-scripting.pdf
[2] http://www.open.ou.nl/bhr/TopQuality.pdf
[3] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/Top
[4] http://www.itu.dk/people/drc/drafts/error-reflection-submission.pdf
[5] https://gist.github.com/david-christiansen/8349698

On Sun Nov 23 2014 at 3:57:10 AM Alberto G. Corona <agocorona at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Michael:
>
> You are right, but these are minor problems I think, compared with the
> huge potential advantages.
>
>  I can not believe it when a slow immature language like Ruby could take
> over web development just for one library, Rails and some buzzwords, when a
> faster, safer language can do it millions of times better.  Haskell  can
> revolutionize all the industry simply selling it not as one more language,
> but as THE meta-language for building EDSLs for each domain problem. some
> EDSLs so close to the domain problem that can be used by non-programmers.
>
> That lack of vision and effort in the side of the haskell community hurts
> me. And the lack of interest in this ticket
>
> https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/7870
>
> Is a clear display of this lack of interest.  it is like the Aristocracy
> of the Haskell Wondwerland fears to be hijacked by hordes of mediocre DSL
> villains from the industry, so it is necessary to keep the walls high
>
> Haskell is a language dominated by academics that has no interest in the
> success of Haskell. On the contrary.
>
> 2014-10-29 15:13 GMT+01:00 Michael Jones <mike at proclivis.com>:
>
>> When I took a Lambda Calculus class years ago in Silicon Valley, 90% of
>> the students groaned and complained. They just wanted to learn Java and
>> make money. Having a background in OO design and experience with Eiffel, I
>> was intrigued and stuck with it, building some tools with ML, and later
>> Haskell.
>>
>> In the workplace it was near impossible to avoid the .Net culture, and
>> most of my code has been C#. But the factors that mattered were:
>>
>> - Continuity with past languages and tools
>> - Availability of programmers
>> - Third party libraries
>> - Inter langage operability
>> - Reuse of legacy code
>>
>> etc
>>
>> Best I can tell, there is no way to avoid the business context. I suggest
>> that if you have freedom, you need to be multilingual. Many systems could
>> benefit from applying the proper tool to the corresponding problem.
>>
>> But I will say this, becoming proficient at Haskell really improved my
>> designs by providing an alternative conceptual framework. But, it had a
>> very substantial learning curve. All I can say is trust that even if your
>> core language is procedural, you will be better at that for learning a
>> functional language.
>>
>> To make Haskell a first class citizen in the IT shops, I think focus
>> would have to shift more to the business context and needs. And certainly
>> more focus in the universities that are still dominated by procedural
>> languages. Once that is drilled into ones head, it affects the way one
>> thinks.
>>
>> To give an example, I have these problems:
>>
>> - Update to GHC 7.8.3 from 7.6 caused run time behavior changes breaking
>> USB application
>> - Sandboxes are not completely isolated from the core library and often
>> builds break
>> - Most new grads don’t even know what a functional language is
>> - Documentation gets out of sync with releases (where documentation means
>> Wiki and web)
>> - FFI is difficult to use and debug
>> - Lack of books, user groups, etc
>>
>> Mike
>>
>> On Oct 29, 2014, at 3:48 AM, Alberto G. Corona <agocorona at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> I know that I'm using a different language when talking about monads. The
>> language of the IT industry.
>>
>> Many haskellers use the language for toy programming. Others are
>> professional academics. The few that use the language for commercial
>> purposes are too busy developing practical applications rather than
>> thinking deep about how to apply the haskell concepts to their problems.
>> As a result many of such problems remains essentially unsolved. These busy
>> developers try to transcode solutions from other languages that lack the
>> deep and expressiveness of Haskell.
>>
>> This lack of interest in one side and the lack of time in the other is
>> disappointing. The symptoms are everywhere. Particularly, I find it in the
>> lack of support and interests for this ticket:
>>
>> https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/7870
>>
>> I though that there was definitively a shift from "avoid success at all
>> costs" a few years ago, for a commitment for the success, but still there
>> are many minds to change, especially the brilliant ones.
>>
>> 2014-10-26 2:02 GMT+01:00 Alberto G. Corona <agocorona at gmail.com>:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> 2014-10-26 1:23 GMT+02:00 Jeffrey Brown <jeffbrown.the at gmail.com>:
>>>
>>>> As opposed to the internal logic of monads, how they work, I hope to
>>>> start a discussion about their external logic: how and why to use monads.
>>>>
>>>> design
>>>> ------
>>>> How do monads change the way one
>>>> * thinks about a problem?
>>>> * structures data?
>>>> * refactors?
>>>> * tests?
>>>> Should I always be giving the monads a lot of cognitive bandwidth,
>>>> because they reorder the way everything should be, or is it an investment
>>>> with a high initial cognitive cost but requiring little maintenance
>>>> thereafter?
>>>>
>>>> what is their common framework?
>>>> -------------------------------
>>>> Monads let data reach farther than it otherwise would. Subjectively,
>>>> they feel like a controlled way of violating encapsulation.
>>>>
>>>> Are there other, deeper or more specific, commonalities that explain
>>>> why monads are a good way to implement exceptions, output, state, and
>>>> perhaps other services?
>>>>
>>>
>>> I made monads for execution state recovery, web navigation.. workflows,
>>>  long running transactions, backtracking, traceback and event chaining in
>>> web browser applications.
>>>
>>> I´m confident that the perspectives for monads to solve real IT problems
>>> are very promising. And when I mean monad I mean all the associated stuff :
>>> applicative, alternative etc.
>>>
>>> I´m confident that there will be a cloud monad (for chaining jobs and
>>> work distribution) an orchestration monad for orchestration of web services
>>> etc.
>>>
>>> There are problems that are intrinsically procedural among them, almost
>>> all problems in IT. instead of using ad-hoc  data/control structures like
>>> events, handlers, configurations, routes, exceptions, logs, transaction
>>> compensations, promises ....the list goes on and on , the monad is the
>>> common control structure that can subsume all of them inside his
>>> programmable semicolon
>>>
>>> So, once the monad is set up, the user of the monad code the solution
>>> for the domain problem in a clean EDSL with absolutely no plumbing, at the
>>> level of the problem. so anyone that know the problem can understand the
>>> code.
>>>
>>> Is the monad instance, and the applicative etc the ones that subsume
>>> under the hood the special data/control structure necessary for the domain
>>> problem.
>>>
>>>
>>> Often if your code is general enough, it can be used in any monad. So
>>> you benefit from this. I think that in th future there will be a lot of
>>> surprises about the shareability of code between monads when the IT
>>> industry start to use them seriously. I think that we are just at the
>>> beginning.
>>>
>>> I hope that some others of your questions are also answered here
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Alberto.
>>
>>
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