Actually, that previous reply was a little dismissive. Let me explain.
If you write what is basically C code in Haskell, you will end up with maintenance difficulties. A small change may well result in a large restructure. You need to write Haskell code in Haskell (although ML code or Lisp code might also do if you're clever).
Having said that, your code still might not have been as ideomatic as it could be. For example, what was originally just IO could end up as a huge stack of monad transformers by the time you're done. Making a type synonym for the monad in the first place saves you a lot of hassle down the track.
I don't necessarily agree with that.
I say this from bitter experience. There is many a time when I've had to thread something through a lot of code, and the compiler found every place where it was needed. No, it wasn't pleasant. But it worked first time.
Also, dynamically typed languages like Python also make restructuring easier (using C++/Java as a baseline).
On the other hand, in that situation the compiler isn't working for you. It isn't working against you, either, but a bug found for you is a bug you don't have to track down.
The problem with it is that because it's functional you often end up restructuring half the program for what would have been a trivial change in an imperative language.
While I don't disagree with this, there are some counter-arguments too:
If you find yourself doing that, you may have written your original program in an imperative style in the first place. Alan Holub's argument about getter/setter methods applies to declarative programming too. If you wrote in a more language-ideomatic style, you might not be facing a huge restructure at all.
Much the same problem can happen in imperative languages, only the class of changes which would trigger such a restructure are different. For example, in a non-GC'd language, you may end up restructuring your program if some critical data lifetime changes. Or, instead of restructuring your program, you might prefer to hack it up instead, making it less maintainable. (It might be argued that languages like Haskell, which discourage this kind of hackery, might be a good thing in the hands of a certain kind of programmer.)
Even if you do have to restructure half the program, tools like Haskell's type system make this a less painful task than it would otherwise be.
Knowing a language also means knowing what kinds of changes are painful and what kinds of changes are not. Knowing this in advance helps you write your programs to be more future-proof.
I'm not the grandparent poster. I am a long-time Haskell user, though.
Saying that Haskell is "all over industry" is a gross exaggeration. Anecdotal evidence from Haskell users is that they are all over industry, and they tend to use Haskell in their work, though not necessarily in code that other people see. I, for example, have been known to prototype algorithms in Haskell and then translate them into C++ for our product.
Having said that, there are several consultants out there who write custom apps for clients in Haskell, and at least twocompanies who heavily rely on it.
It is fair to say that Haskell is all over academia, being used to solve difficult CS-like problems. However, academic uses tend not to impress people, even if it is the best tool for a particular job.
A few hundred years ago, everyone knew what a fairy was. It was the equivalent of a modern grey alien. They might, for example, cast a glamour on you, or abduct your children and replace them with a changeling.
The new wave of children stories, such as those by Perrault, were considered to corrupt children's minds in much the same way as a fairy would. Hence, they were derisively referred to as "fairy tales".
Why is the BBC interested in keeping up with the times? Ah competition, that would be it.
Help me out here. I'm not British, so I don't know how this works, but what incentives (I assume financial) are there to encourage the BBC to chase ratings? Is their income varied based on ratings? Who does the audit?
I reckon the IT administrator job has to be even worse than helpdesk. Sure, the helpdesk has to put up with clueless lusers who couldn't find their Asus with both hands. However, the IT administrator has to put up with management. IT administrators are required to pull off miracles with no budget, no staff, and lots of unpaid overtime. And if anything does go wrong (which, thanks to Finagle's Law, it will), then they not only did something wrong, but they are almost never given the resources or authority to do anything about it.
With helpdesk, at least you don't have to do the politics. You just play the gig.
I don't know the Tezuka thing, but the Lion King is nothing whatsoever like Hamlet.
The Lion King is like Hamlet in the same sense that Being John Malkovich is like Jack and the Beanstalk, Psycho is like Little Red Riding Hood and most teen movies are like Cinderella. Every analogy breaks down, this is true, but the story actually follows that of Hamlet fairly closely. Some of the characters differ, but the plot is fairly close.
And yes, a lot of the story goes back before Hamlet. And the story of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe goes back before the New Testament, too. That's my point: No story is 100% original. See Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces for further details.
And the Kimba/Simba thing? Nothing suspicious there?
No more suspicious than the Reservoir Dogs naming people after colours thing.
You can think of it one of two ways 1) coincidence (you have to admit that there are only so many African-sounding names which roll off the tongue in the English-speaking world) or 2) tribute. Either way it's perfectly legitimate.
Though I do take your point about Disney being who they are wrt copyright.
When disney puts out a movie about "shmamlet", you'll have a point.
You mean as opposed to a film about a prince whose father was killed by his evil uncle and was sent into exile, and then later was forced to make a decision about whether or not to come back and claim the throne?
If it helps, remember that The Merchant of Venice was only written because some patron wanted a play that was like Marlowe's The Jew of Malta. Borrowing and re-adapting stories has a long and noble history.
Pixar, on the other hand, doesn't have that same luxury.
More importantly, Pixar doesn't think that way.
As previously noted, TS2 was going to be a STV release. Then someone at Pixar had a brainwave: If you plan to make a film that's not as good as it could be, then you have become the next Michael Eisner. You should never plan to make filler material. So they didn't, and the rest is history.
Whilst I trust you are fully qualified to make that assertion (haha) [...]
My wife is an art history major, FWIW. She told me this, and she also explained why. If you have a few spare hours and an art gallery handy, I can try explaining it to you, or I could just bring my wife along.
Van Gogh's art isn't very good. He was almost certainly manic during his most prolific period, when he would produce as many as 800 paintings or drawings a year (or so; can't remember the precise figure). Compared to the other French impressionists (assuming that you count van Gogh as an impressionist), his works are rushed and it shows.
Van Gogh would hardly be remembered today if it wasn't for the fact that he had an interesting life that was re-discovered after his death. This re-discovering resulted in a huge influence on abstract expressionism.
That is actually a fairly controversial statement, IMO, though historians would disagree.
Unlike Michelangelo, where there is a fair amount of evidence that he was gay, the only evidence that we have for Leonardo being gay was a) he never married, b) his "protoge" (for lack of a better term) was an attractive young man, whom he nicknamed "Salai" (Little Devil), and c) he was anonymously accused of homosexual conduct once, though he was acquitted due to lack of evidence.
We can dismiss point c) straight away. He was also accused of necromancy due to his anatomical dissections. People accused people of all sorts of things.
Point a) is easily explainable by the fact that Leonardo was a geek, or possibly that he has some form of autism spectrum disorder.
That leaves only b). Admittedly, this is about as good as evidence gets sometimes, but it still feels wrong. I have a suspicion that those who developed the theory that Leonardo was gay were not themselves true geeks, or didn't understand autism, so don't appreciate how the company of a like mind might be more appealing than the opposite sex to some people.
Re:Which is really surprising to me
on
Decompiling Java
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On the other hand, also speaking as a compiler hacker, I should point out that just because an optimisation is possible, doesn't mean it's a good idea. When you add more optimisation, it costs. It's extra code that you have to write, test and maintain over the life of the compiler. If its entire purpose is to make the rare case of badly written code go faster, then you could quite legitimately turn around to the compiler user and say "don't do that".
As an example, a compiler could quite easily optimise sin(x)*sin(x) + cos(x)*cos(x) to 1.0 (modulo floating-point roundoff error) wherever it occurs. But if you write expressions like that, surely you deserve the generated code that you get.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, that previous reply was a little dismissive. Let me explain.
If you write what is basically C code in Haskell, you will end up with maintenance difficulties. A small change may well result in a large restructure. You need to write Haskell code in Haskell (although ML code or Lisp code might also do if you're clever).
I meant what I said.
Right, hence I said it "may" be the cause. :-)
Having said that, your code still might not have been as ideomatic as it could be. For example, what was originally just IO could end up as a huge stack of monad transformers by the time you're done. Making a type synonym for the monad in the first place saves you a lot of hassle down the track.
I say this from bitter experience. There is many a time when I've had to thread something through a lot of code, and the compiler found every place where it was needed. No, it wasn't pleasant. But it worked first time.
On the other hand, in that situation the compiler isn't working for you. It isn't working against you, either, but a bug found for you is a bug you don't have to track down.
While I don't disagree with this, there are some counter-arguments too:
Knowing a language also means knowing what kinds of changes are painful and what kinds of changes are not. Knowing this in advance helps you write your programs to be more future-proof.
I'm not the grandparent poster. I am a long-time Haskell user, though.
Saying that Haskell is "all over industry" is a gross exaggeration. Anecdotal evidence from Haskell users is that they are all over industry, and they tend to use Haskell in their work, though not necessarily in code that other people see. I, for example, have been known to prototype algorithms in Haskell and then translate them into C++ for our product.
Having said that, there are several consultants out there who write custom apps for clients in Haskell, and at least two companies who heavily rely on it.
It is fair to say that Haskell is all over academia, being used to solve difficult CS-like problems. However, academic uses tend not to impress people, even if it is the best tool for a particular job.
Just like how nobody uses CVSup because it's written in Modula-3, right?
A few hundred years ago, everyone knew what a fairy was. It was the equivalent of a modern grey alien. They might, for example, cast a glamour on you, or abduct your children and replace them with a changeling.
The new wave of children stories, such as those by Perrault, were considered to corrupt children's minds in much the same way as a fairy would. Hence, they were derisively referred to as "fairy tales".
Help me out here. I'm not British, so I don't know how this works, but what incentives (I assume financial) are there to encourage the BBC to chase ratings? Is their income varied based on ratings? Who does the audit?
I reckon the IT administrator job has to be even worse than helpdesk. Sure, the helpdesk has to put up with clueless lusers who couldn't find their Asus with both hands. However, the IT administrator has to put up with management. IT administrators are required to pull off miracles with no budget, no staff, and lots of unpaid overtime. And if anything does go wrong (which, thanks to Finagle's Law, it will), then they not only did something wrong, but they are almost never given the resources or authority to do anything about it.
With helpdesk, at least you don't have to do the politics. You just play the gig.
True. Apologies to the fine people at cop.net who have just had their bandwidth killed.
Spam this:
I figure anyone who spams SpamCop deserves what they get.
You start the mailing list and I'll join it.
The Lion King is like Hamlet in the same sense that Being John Malkovich is like Jack and the Beanstalk, Psycho is like Little Red Riding Hood and most teen movies are like Cinderella. Every analogy breaks down, this is true, but the story actually follows that of Hamlet fairly closely. Some of the characters differ, but the plot is fairly close.
And yes, a lot of the story goes back before Hamlet. And the story of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe goes back before the New Testament, too. That's my point: No story is 100% original. See Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces for further details.
No more suspicious than the Reservoir Dogs naming people after colours thing.
You can think of it one of two ways 1) coincidence (you have to admit that there are only so many African-sounding names which roll off the tongue in the English-speaking world) or 2) tribute. Either way it's perfectly legitimate.
Though I do take your point about Disney being who they are wrt copyright.
You mean as opposed to a film about a prince whose father was killed by his evil uncle and was sent into exile, and then later was forced to make a decision about whether or not to come back and claim the throne?
If it helps, remember that The Merchant of Venice was only written because some patron wanted a play that was like Marlowe's The Jew of Malta. Borrowing and re-adapting stories has a long and noble history.
More importantly, Pixar doesn't think that way.
As previously noted, TS2 was going to be a STV release. Then someone at Pixar had a brainwave: If you plan to make a film that's not as good as it could be, then you have become the next Michael Eisner. You should never plan to make filler material. So they didn't, and the rest is history.
...and before Tezuka, the story was called Hamlet.
When will people learn that no story is 100% original?
My wife is an art history major, FWIW. She told me this, and she also explained why. If you have a few spare hours and an art gallery handy, I can try explaining it to you, or I could just bring my wife along.
Van Gogh's art isn't very good. He was almost certainly manic during his most prolific period, when he would produce as many as 800 paintings or drawings a year (or so; can't remember the precise figure). Compared to the other French impressionists (assuming that you count van Gogh as an impressionist), his works are rushed and it shows.
Van Gogh would hardly be remembered today if it wasn't for the fact that he had an interesting life that was re-discovered after his death. This re-discovering resulted in a huge influence on abstract expressionism.
Uhm... van Gogh, Michaelangelo and da Vinci all studied under other people.
Van Gogh tended to get kicked out of art schools, this is true. It may or may not be a coincidence that his art isn't very good as these things go.
So a mandelbrot would be about one deci-edison on the old measure, then?
We have a lot of MIDI sequencers, but no decent music notation software. No, MusicTeX doesn't count.
That is actually a fairly controversial statement, IMO, though historians would disagree.
Unlike Michelangelo, where there is a fair amount of evidence that he was gay, the only evidence that we have for Leonardo being gay was a) he never married, b) his "protoge" (for lack of a better term) was an attractive young man, whom he nicknamed "Salai" (Little Devil), and c) he was anonymously accused of homosexual conduct once, though he was acquitted due to lack of evidence.
We can dismiss point c) straight away. He was also accused of necromancy due to his anatomical dissections. People accused people of all sorts of things.
Point a) is easily explainable by the fact that Leonardo was a geek, or possibly that he has some form of autism spectrum disorder.
That leaves only b). Admittedly, this is about as good as evidence gets sometimes, but it still feels wrong. I have a suspicion that those who developed the theory that Leonardo was gay were not themselves true geeks, or didn't understand autism, so don't appreciate how the company of a like mind might be more appealing than the opposite sex to some people.
On the other hand, also speaking as a compiler hacker, I should point out that just because an optimisation is possible, doesn't mean it's a good idea. When you add more optimisation, it costs. It's extra code that you have to write, test and maintain over the life of the compiler. If its entire purpose is to make the rare case of badly written code go faster, then you could quite legitimately turn around to the compiler user and say "don't do that".
As an example, a compiler could quite easily optimise sin(x)*sin(x) + cos(x)*cos(x) to 1.0 (modulo floating-point roundoff error) wherever it occurs. But if you write expressions like that, surely you deserve the generated code that you get.
Now I'm confused. I always thought the first Daemon was drawn by John Lasseter.
Not quite. To implement a parser generator as quickly as possible, the backtracking features of Prolog are going to be crucial.
In Erlang, it's going to take a little bit longer to write. On the other hand, unlike the Prolog version, it will probably work.