[Haskell-cafe] Domain specific error messages

Sun Nov 23 19:36:32 UTC 2014

Thanks for breaking this discussion out with a fresh subject line, or otherwise I would not have seen it.

As an active GHC developer and budding academic, I thought I could share my views on this subject: Please please please let's do this! (This = come up with a way for better error messages in EDSLs.) I've never heard anyone say the lack of customizable error messages is an insignificant or unimportant problem. Nor am I familiar with any efforts to redirect or stymie such work. However, I completely agree that nothing is getting done.

The problem I see here is a false underlying assumption: "If the community wants to do X, then X will get done." This assumption, on the surface, seems reasonable enough. However, it seems to apply most in a resource-rich community. For better or worse, Haskell/GHC today is not particularly resource-rich, in the resource that counts: developer-hours.

As far as I know, there is precisely one person whose day job is to work on GHC (Austin Seipp). The rest of the work is "volunteer". I put "volunteer" in quotes because the rest of us get compensated in various ways for our contributions. My personal compensation (along with the happiness of contributing to an open-source project) is that working on GHC makes my research more relevant and more interesting. Because I work on GHC and can claim to have released my research, I estimate that it's more likely that my papers get accepted for publication. This creates a nice incentive for me to work on GHC. And I'm happy to do so -- it's also plenty of fun. But, there is very little incentive for me, personally, right now, to dive into the worthy cause of error message customization, because that topic is only loosely related to my primary research thrust, which is dependent types.

I imagine that a similar incentive structure exists for other GHC contributors. And so, we wait for someone to come along and fix the problem. Going back to the original, false assumption: yes, I believe that the community wants error message customization, but currently no appropriately-motivated individual wants it and has the time to spend making it happen.

So, to those of you who really want this feature: design and implement it! And, to those of you working for businesses that would benefit from this feature: incentivize (that is, pay) someone to design and implement it! I, for one, would welcome either development with open arms.

Richard

On Nov 23, 2014, at 1:01 PM, Alberto G. Corona <agocorona at gmail.com> wrote:

> I Sean. I saw your message in the gmail spam shortly after sending my response. Knowing how the gmail spam detection works based on other's behaviours, maybe someone don´t like to read it ;))
> 
> If that is the case, less they would like to read my response in the mentioned thread:
> 
> Hi Sean,
> 
>  I knew [1] in a discussion here about the same topic. 
> 
> https://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2013-April/107799.html
> 
> As a consequence of that I created the ticket. I expected that the end of the research was some results applied to a major haskell compiler, specially GHC to really solve the problem. I know that this was the intention of the authors And they said so in the discussion.
> 
> But given the evident lack of interest of the Haskell community from the day one, specially the ones supposedly interested in the success of Haskell on industry and  given the natural tendency of academic research to waste valuable efforts when there is no clear incentives by the industry, I suspect  that the work will stay as such: research.
> 
> I suspect that the authors are as disappointed as me. It is so evident that this is THE problem of Haskell, the main barrier that precludes entering by storm in the industry in the form of hundred of EDSLs, and is so evident the lack of interest of anyone in the Haskell community that I can`t say more. That is why I mention this tangentially in this corner of the discussion group. This way many people can read this and pretend that they have not.
> 
> I know that computer science and science are driven by the same forces that drive everything else in human affairs. Academics well being  is not challenged by niche and marginal industries that may drain some postdocs, but fear that the heavy IT industry would pollute their bucolic green pastures, well watered by state subsidies. 
> 
> In the other side, I understand that niche industries are not interested in solving this issue, since they have their own haskell experts. But the reason why Microsoft or, in a lesser extent, FP complete does not push to solve the issue is beyond my understanding.
> 
> 
> 
> 2014-11-23 0:01 GMT+01:00 Sean Seefried <sean.seefried at gmail.com>:
> 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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> 
> -- 
> Alberto.
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