[Haskell-cafe] Domain specific error messages

[Alejandro Serrano Mena]

At Utrecht University we are currently tackling this problem, in the form
of the DOMain Specific Type Error Diagnosis (DOMSTED) Project [1].
So at least we have one person (me) working full-time on it, plus my
supervisor Jurriaan Hage, which had already worked in a similar project for
Haskell 98 which produced the Helium [2] compiler.
We are slowly building step towards a nice way to create domain specific
error messages, and we expect to have some nice results soon :)
Of course, if you have any ideas on how to improve error messages, feel
free to contact me :)

Alejandro.

[1] http://www.cs.uu.nl/research/techreps/repo/CS-2014/2014-019.pdf
[2] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/helium

2014-11-23 21:42 GMT+01:00 Wojciech Danilo <wojciech.danilo at gmail.com>:

> Richard - did you think about some way of funding Haskell development? I
> think a lot of people are talking about low people-hours spend on GHC, but
> nobody ever told that a good solution here will be funding of its
> development. We've got so many options here - dotations, companies, vc's,
> community funding (maybe even kickstarter). You know, this would help MUCH
> Haskell and overall - everyone from this community. But in general - people
> are not working this way, that if somebody will tell - this is a good idea,
> everybody woudl do it. I'm writing exactly to you, because you are somebody
> very close to GHC and we all see, you "want" to do something good. Why not
> get funding for Haskell and GHC? I would love to help, really - as much as
> I can. But if everyone agree, we have to do something with it, as fast as
> possbile, othercase, Haskell will slowly die - taking in consideration how
> much moneyu is put in Scala, Go etc. These languages are getting better
> everyday - and of course, they've got another asusmptions than the best
> programming language I've been suing in my life, they have got many
> man-hours more spend on development than we do.
> What do you think?
>
> All the best,
> Wojciech
>
> Sun Nov 23 2014 at 8:42:29 PM użytkownik Artyom <yom at artyom.me> napisał:
>
> On 11/23/2014 09:01 PM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:
>>
>>     It is so evident that this is THE problem of Haskell
>>
>> Unfortunately, it’s not evident. Note that I’m /not/ saying it’s not
>> “the” problem of Haskell; merely that
>>
>>   *
>>
>>     I consider myself to be somewhat intelligent
>>
>>   *
>>
>>     and – without having put much thought into this question – I don’t
>>     find it evident at all that the incomprehensibility of error
>>     messages arising when using DSLs is “probably the biggest barrier
>>     for the acceptance of Haskell on Industry”
>>
>> Therefore, unless you’re sure for some reason that I’m an outlier and
>> the majority of programmers /do/ find it evident but prefer to pretend
>> they don’t (for pragmatic, evil, or other reasons), I would suggest
>> writing an article attempting to persuade the community that it’s indeed
>> a major problem – or, better yet, the problem which has the biggest
>> utility/complexity-of-implementation ratio. I remember that what got me
>> into Haskell was simply a handful of “mind-blowing” examples – an easily
>> readable parser in a few lines of code, the elegance of |map| versus a
>> |for| loop, things like that. A post with side-by-side comparisons of
>> real-world GHC error messages arising when working with various DSLs
>> (parsec, attoparsec, blaze, binary, diagrams, etc.) vs. mockups of
>> improved error messages, alongside with a section describing the current
>> research done in this direction and outlining general ideas/concepts,
>> would probably do the trick.
>>
>> ​
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