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Optimizing Development For Fun

Posted by Zonk on from the haskell-has-never-been-or-will-ever-be-fun dept.

chromatic writes "Geoff Broadwell has written an analysis of optimizing an open source project for fun, specifically the Pugs project. Broadwell argues that making development fun and easy leads to higher quality code and a faster velocity of development, even when implementing a frivolous project (a toy Perl 6 interpreter) in an uncommon language (Haskell). The Pugs leader, Autrijus Tang, will speak about both Pugs and Haskell at EuroOSCON."

3 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. Want to make dev fun? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Use Python!

    Seriously - we use it except in a few places where C/C++ is a better fit for interfacing with DirectX. The results? People are having real fun and getting a ton done. We couldn't be happier.

    1. Re:Want to make dev fun? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Except that this article is about people developing in Haskell - a language that's every bit as fun to use as Python (it even has optional syntactic whitespace), but compiles to native code (so it's faster) and infers types at compile-time (so it's robuster).

      Think Pugs is cool? Look at this. These guys have implemented a complete transactional file system - looks like a Unix FS, but provides snapshots, unlimited undo, true copy-on-write handling of links (including link cycles), and perfect concurrency without requiring any OS-level threading. In just 540 lines of Haskell.

      Give it a try. The learning curve's steep at first - it's got some concepts you simply won't have encountered anywhere else. But if you're smart enough to have dropped C++ in favour of Python, you're smart enough to handle Haskell.

  2. Avoid Recursion by Dante+Shamest · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Things to Avoid: The Haskell Wiki