[Haskell-cafe] Haskell Usage

Thu Nov 16 01:34:55 UTC 2023

I've a foot in both the Erlang and the Haskell camps.
Erlang was designed at a commercial organisation (Ericsson) for a
commercial purpose (programming telecoms devices and applications).
It was heavily influenced by Lisp, Prolog, and Strand88, none of which
was a mainstream "industrial" language, and was in some ways a
reaction against Ericsson's "EriPascal" (think CHILL -- if you know
what that is -- with a Pascal base instead of PL/I) which was very
much an "industrial" language, and even more a reaction against the OO
(= C++) hype of the day.
You can think of Erlang as "concurrency, with just enough language",
an experiment in language design that worked brilliantly.

Haskell was designed to unify a number of functional language research
groups.  "How about instead of all working on our own little
languages, we agree on one language so we can all use each other's
ideas right away".  I think it's fair to say that initially, Haskell
too was "<core ideas> with just enough language".  It has worked
brilliantly too.

The two languages have some overlap.  Haskell picked up concurrency;
Erlang picked up types.  Both of them have lexical analyser generators
and parser generators.  Both of then ended up with preprocessors
(Haskell = cpp, Erlang = home-brew).  Both of them these days compile
to a core.

I'm reminded of one of my university lecturers from back about 1978.
He was visiting from the Sorbonne.  It was a one-year paper on Spinor
Calculus.  This guy began with meta-mathematics.  By half way through
the year he'd got as far as defining A raised to the power B where A
and B are sets.  He finally arrived at spinors in the last two weeks.
He was SO theory oriented the paper was no practical use to me.  But
THAT guy said "all good theory has to start with a practical problem".

The practical problem we face is "how do we write programs that work,
with a reasonable amount of effort."  When I run a PDF viewer on
Linux, i tend to get a lot of error messages spewed out on the console
due to changes in some internal interface.  When I run a typical
Windows program, just as many error messages come out, they just go
into system logs.  Whatever we're doing to write programs now, they
DON'T WORK.

Haskell is a very practical tool, if "making it work" is what you want
to practice.

On Thu, 16 Nov 2023 at 09:43, Noon van der Silk <noonsilk at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'll just add that there are many companies that use Haskell in a professional setting (including the one I work for!) You can see a few at the bottom of the Haskell Foundation's website: https://haskell.foundation/.
>
> It's certainly an odd remark by your professor; but it also likely comes from their own experience; everyone has lived life in their own different way; maybe this person has just been exposed to more commercial Erlang than me; almost certainly :) So I would take the comment more with curiosity; to learn why they feel Erlang is more suitable; it's probably a good opportunity to learn something interesting!
>
> That said, I do think Haskell has an "academic" vibe that it will do well to shake off at some point!
>
> --
> Noon
>
>
> On Wed, 15 Nov 2023 at 20:25, Adrian Cochrane <adrian at openwork.nz> wrote:
>>
>> Hi from New Zealand!
>>
>> My Haskell usage is more hobbyist than academic or industrial, but I've
>> got a massive personal project written in Haskell (a browser engine).
>> And I'm actively for one of my upcoming contracts (a converter between
>> metadata formats) to use Haskell!
>>
>> I find I'm more productive in Haskell, and that my code is of generally
>> higher quality. Its certainly not a popular language (neither is Erlang)
>> though, which I have to actively plan for when suggesting it for a
>> project. But given the dominance of C/C++, does that count for much?
>>
>> On 16/11/2023 1:00 am, haskell-cafe-request at haskell.org wrote:
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>> > Today's Topics:
>> >
>> >     1. Haskell Usage (Henrique Caldeira)
>> >     2. Re: Haskell Usage (Brandon Allbery)
>> >     3. Re: Haskell Usage (Henning Thielemann)
>> >     4. Re: Haskell Usage (Jo Durchholz)
>> >     5. Re: Haskell Usage (MigMit)
>> >     6. Re: Haskell Usage (Ivan Perez)
>> >     7. Re: Haskell Usage (Jared Tobin)
>> >
>> >
>> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>> >
>> > Message: 1
>> > Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2023 21:27:57 +0000 (GMT+00:00)
>> > From: Henrique Caldeira <h.caldeira at ua.pt>
>> > To: haskell-cafe at haskell.org
>> > Subject: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell Usage
>> > Message-ID: <aae4e8e1-bf10-4bd5-bf58-9566b2a0be04 at ua.pt>
>> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>> >
>> > Good Evening from Portugal,
>> >
>> > I write to you about the usage of Haskell because I had a professor recommending me Erlang instead because Haskell was "more for academic purposes", which left me wondering if all my time spent was spent only for curiosity sake.
>> >
>> > I want to know how true my professor's statement is.
>> >
>> > I am very passionate about Haskell, although I admit the ecosystem can be confusing sometimes (for example, when to use cabal or stack, which versions of packages to use in order to avoid conflicts, or simply installing them through nixos or arch can be a learning process).
>> >
>> > Would love to hear your thoughts about all of this and thank you with all my heart.
>> >
>> > Lastly, all these wonderings are asked in a curious, "wanting to learn more" mindset.
>> >
>> > Kind regards,
>> > Henrique Caldeira
>> > -------------- next part --------------
>> > An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
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>> >
>> > ------------------------------
>> >
>> > Message: 2
>> > Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2023 16:36:18 -0500
>> > From: Brandon Allbery <allbery.b at gmail.com>
>> > To: Henrique Caldeira <h.caldeira at ua.pt>
>> > Cc: haskell-cafe at haskell.org
>> > Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell Usage
>> > Message-ID:
>> >       <CAKFCL4W_PHacz19c+LzQ4OrGA1E3MM=LX5KGXA_8gmBGnscEoQ at mail.gmail.com>
>> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>> >
>> > Yesod (https://yesodweb.com), Servant (https://www.servant.dev), Pandoc (
>> > https://pandoc.com), HLedger (https://hledger.org), and XMonad (
>> > https://xmonad.org), among others, argue against Haskell being only an
>> > academic language.
>> >
>> > (I'm the principal maintainer of xmonad, but not involved with the other
>> > packages.)
>> >
>> > On Tue, Nov 14, 2023 at 4:28 PM Henrique Caldeira <h.caldeira at ua.pt> wrote:
>> >
>> >> Good Evening from Portugal,
>> >>
>> >> I write to you about the usage of Haskell because I had a professor
>> >> recommending me Erlang instead because Haskell was "more for academic
>> >> purposes", which left me wondering if all my time spent was spent only for
>> >> curiosity sake.
>> >>
>> >> I want to know how true my professor's statement is.
>> >>
>> >> I am very passionate about Haskell, although I admit the ecosystem can be
>> >> confusing sometimes (for example, when to use cabal or stack, which
>> >> versions of packages to use in order to avoid conflicts, or simply
>> >> installing them through nixos or arch can be a learning process).
>> >>
>> >> Would love to hear your thoughts about all of this and thank you with all
>> >> my heart.
>> >>
>> >> Lastly, all these wonderings are asked in a curious, "wanting to learn
>> >> more" mindset.
>> >>
>> >> Kind regards,
>> >> Henrique Caldeira
>> >> _______________________________________________
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>> >
>> >
>> >
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>
>
>
> --
> Noon van der Silk, ن
>
> http://silky.github.io/
>
> "My programming language is kindness."
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