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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."

4 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. Re:This is all well and good... by NanoGator · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "If you're not enjoying what you're doing, why are you doing it?"

    Food on the table, mainly.

    In any event, I think questions like this are more helpful for management than they are for programmers or anybody else with a similar profession. The article uses the word 'fun', but in practice, I think 'importance' is a more interesting term. (Maybe they're not all that dissimilar?) Constantly changing directions in order to meet arbitrary deadlines or "chasing money" is a real morale killer. Working with well laid plan knowing that you're boring work is going to pay off into an interesting product, that's a lot more interesting. It's important.

    Eh I think I'm mainly just stating the obvious here. When I hear stories of companies like EA demanding tons of unpaid overtime to meet an arbitrary deadline, it seems to me that even the 'fun' parts of asset building turn into a curse real fast. It's not fun to try to shortcut your way to the finish line with the concern that one of those shortcuts will come back and nip your hinder.

    --
    "Derp de derp."
  3. Avoid Recursion by Dante+Shamest · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Things to Avoid: The Haskell Wiki