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I’m trying to write a Twitter bot obsessed with pie (in Haskell). It is…slow going, but I am learning a lot. This week I am trying to figure out acid-state and how to test to make sure what I have so far is working as it should. And someday if I keep poking at this thing, I will bend Twitter to my pie-loving ways.
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I do Haskell stuff.
Twitter NLP bot
Github events -> IRC bot
Book, g'dammit.
Talking to publishers about #3
PR’d the twitter-types Haskell library, probably continue to kick that around as #1 develops.
Hoping to avoid Haskell infra work this week (Hackage, Cabal), but it seems like I might end up fixing Hackage-Fu.
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github link for the twitter nlp bot?
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It’s still very, very early. It’s a project for a student to learn NLP + Haskell + API access + data persistence.
There’s nothing interesting yet. Rest assured, it will be posted to lobste.rs when it has expanded a bit. We’re still figuring out how to pull down and analyze data.
Also, it’s a bot obsessed with pie. Just pie.
To give you an idea of how early: we haven’t even tested a dumb, manual scoring lexicon with word normalization - let alone a topic model / classifier.
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There’s nothing wrong with being obsessed with pie.
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Nothing good will really come of me posting this, but …
There’s an elephant in the room.
The situation experienced by kf isn’t likely to have been just the result of that one exchange. One of the parties involved here is widely seen in a fairly negative light for activities over several months. You can’t take kf’s reaction out of that broader and much wider context.
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I am the author of the blog post. I tried not to make it about specific individuals, because I think the topic is larger than that and I don’t find debating individuals' personalities to be productive.
If I am understanding you correctly, the party who “is widely seen in a fairly negative light” is not the person kf was originally reacting to; she was originally reacting to a conference presentation by another person entirely. The thread already had many other participants complaining about the condescension–not just kf–before that party interjected. So, while understanding that kind of context can be helpful in some situations, I don’t think it’s especially relevant to this one.
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This is nonsense - Clojure, OCaml, Elixir etc can evidently be learned via web-apps without being “stringy/numby/mutatey whatevers”.
Shame that most Haskell evangelists can’t be as honest as Simon Peyton Jones: the trade off for Haskell’s benefits is making things that are easy in other languages obscure and difficult (the ‘hair shirt’). Whether those trade offs are worth it is contextual and, probably, personal.
Stronger point with OCaml than Elixir or Clojure, but you’d have to read very uncharitably to think I was talking about ML users. (Why would I be? ML users have and use a proper type system.)
I was a Clojure user before Haskell. You’re still structuring your data in Clojure most often in terms of a Map, the semantics and general patterns involved aren’t much different from Python or Ruby. I was speaking to what’s most common in industry. Most programmers I’ve known are jumping between Ruby/Python/JS/Clojure or languages like them.
I think you’re taking an overly reductionist line of thinking. Distilling languages down to “haskell’s type system” and “not haskell’s type system” will lead one to your philosophy, but misses out on a bunch of cool differentiating factors among languages. Erlang is great because of the concurrency model, Elixir builds on that with metaprogramming, Clojure inherits a lot of the nice qualities from the JVM, Scala brings an assload of complexity and pain to the act of writing code, python is as simple as dirt, rust has a reasonable type system and a great deal of control over your memory, etc, etc. Taking a binary approach to language classification is an over simplification and will constrain your thinking, which is objectively a Bad Thing.
Also, as an aside, cut the crap with the smug tone, referring to languages your don’t like as $BOZOLANG isn’t constructive.
I didn’t write the post because I wanted to talk about other languages. I wrote it because I wanted to explain why were taking a particular approach to teaching Haskell and why it requires taking learning the basics seriously (because it’s different).
Haskell being different isn’t a value judgment, it’s an observation about the foundations of the language contra almost all others (pure lambda calculus vs. augmented lambda calculus or fully imperative semantics).
If you’re secure in your choice of tools a single line like:
shouldn’t create an entire sub-branch in a comment thread. That line also was not a value judgment, but a comment upon how easy it is for people to learn Ruby/Python/JS/etc. when they already know one of the other languages in that list.
It doesn’t matter that Clojure inherits whatever from the JVM or Elixir adds metaprogramming and better syntax to Erlang. These are orthogonal to my point. I’ve used these languages (Clojure particularly) and am comfortable with them, I’m talking about the core semantics of the programming languages and how what they have in common is frequently ignored by programmers when reasoning about what it’s like to learn a programming language. When you learn Haskell, to understand it properly, you will need to be able to reason in terms of lambda calculus. It’s not difficult, but most people haven’t needed to learn this because very few programming languages have a pure lambda calculus as their core semantics.
It’s about what’s different at the core. That’s all. You’re getting distracted by details irrelevant to the pedagogical issues because like most programmers, you’re taking for granted this collectively shared, fuzzy notion of “how programming works” that is mostly portable with minor modifications across most languages. Most programmers will never confront or understand what they’ve been taking for granted unless they use something outside that paradigm or they teach somebody that’s never programmed before.
I should’ve made this clear in my initial reply but I let the OP’s “getting away from the point of the whole article” distract me.
To understand a programming language, you have to learn the semantics of the programming language.
I am not sure where I side in this argument, or if it is even necessary to take sides, but I think you are incorrect in assuming that people were offended by
The part I found somewhat snarky and flippant was the use of the description
$BOZOLANGfor that group of languages, implying that they are useless.Not to mention that Haskellers tend to be somewhat arrogant about what they believe the “perfect” programming language is, so I already had to consciously overcome some prejudice before I could even start reading the article (and maybe I am showing that I still have some prejudice, in which case, I apologize).
Haskell isn’t perfect, there’s tons I’d like to add/change/remove. (Fair chunk of Prelude, for example; the upcoming Dependent Haskell stuff is exciting but not perfect/ideal)
I don’t even really want programmers-in-general to be convinced it’s a good language to use. I made the point recently on Quora that learning Haskell will not necessarily make you a better programmer in $DAYJOB. The article is about pedagogy, not language choice.
I’ll edit the post so people stop getting distracted.
Pre-emptive apologies if this is off-topic, but the thread seems mostly to be about this now.
I see blog posts (and tweets, and reddit threads, etc) all the time about how Haskell has $THISIMPERFECTION therefore Haskell is completely worthless, and frequent posts (and tweets, etc) about how people who write Haskell are terrible people (usually not phrased as terrible – arrogant, pedantic, condescending, smug…pick a nasty adjective). You just did it yourself, though softening it with “tend to be.”
Honest question: do you find snarking about Haskell and Haskellers to be more acceptable than snarking about other languages?
I am new to Haskell, but honestly so far I haven’t met a single Haskeller who thinks Haskell is perfect – not even Kmett. And I see a bunch of Haskellers I know feeling that they must periodically assert that they know it isn’t perfect in order to avoid being labeled as arrogant, smug, etc. Do users of Golang or Ruby feel the need to frequently publicly assert their belief that their own language isn’t perfect?
Again, I’m new, both to Haskell and to programming (Haskell is my first language; I was a linguist in my younger, more idealistic years), so these are sincere questions. This is in no way meant to posit a specific argument or take sides.
I am not flyingfisch, but I will answer from my perspective. 20+ years in industry, 10+ with Haskell, only one shipped professional project in Haskell, later abandoned and rewritten in C++.
No. All languages gets snarked about – and in most cases there is a kernel of truth under it.
This is because of fairly well earned reputation of Haskellers (mostly around the edges, not core people) being arrogant, pedantic, condescending and smug. When I gave talks on Haskell I did the same thing (I even had line, “Don’t worry, I am not one of ‘them’, lets have some fun”) – because I know the horrible reputation I am up against from the start of a talk. The Haskell core community is full of great people, but as you get out just a little toward the edges you meet the people that use Haskell as an arrogance set piece more than a programming language. They love being able to claim superiority and constantly throw it in others faces. Phrases like “Not smart enough to use Haskell, go use one of your ‘popular’ languages” and far worse / less useful things. This was doubly easy because in most cases they were completely abstracted from having to ship actual code in Haskell, so it gave criticism no purchase… they could claim whatever nonsense they wanted without evidence or reality intruding.
No, because these languages both strive to be fairly inclusive, adopted by corporations and straightforward. Because they are constantly used on real production projects, their faults are laid bare and talked about constantly. Beyond that, the “You are too dumb to ever understand Ruby|Go” just doesn’t fly – they spend 5 minutes reading and have a basic app working – an hour later they have a basic Web App working. Also, both languages are populist and strive to grow in terms of users, something that Haskell has really only gotten on board with in the last few years… and is still have a lot of trouble with, let alone corporate adoption.
The bottom line is, if you want to promote Haskell or teach it… you have to be aware of the public perception of it. Beyond that, I think you have to go out of your way to avoid being arrogant, condescending, smug and asserting things without evidence like “This isn’t hypothetical – I’ve seen a lot of people give up on Haskell because this is how they tried to learn the language.” which you could simplify to “Trust Me” or “Because I Say So” – people burned by the Haskell community in the past will see that as dripping with arrogance.
This is unfair, you didn’t make Haskell have this reputation and were not even aware of it. However, you still have to deal with it. Enough people have been treated poorly by Haskellers (again, along the edges, not core people) and talked down to by them (mostly as a form of lame bullying) to view anyone who claims to come with good tidings from that camp with trepidation.
I think you just have to be aware that a lot of times, the people who might be reading your material have already been burned, they don’t come from a clean slate like you did.
Thanks for writing this, you put my thoughts into words quite nicely. I said “tend to be”, because that’s been my experience, though I realize that YMMV.
I did not mean to be snarky in my comment, I was just making an honest observation about the experiences I have had with the Haskell community on their IRC channel and forums.
That said, I sincerely enjoy using the language, and I hope it continues to grow. And FTR, I have also met great Haskell community members, but for some reason the negative ones are the ones who are the first to pounce on beginners. Of course, that’s just been my experience, there may be some bias involved.
I think I’ve finally realized why I find most of your writing so distasteful. I mean, I’ve always found your writing rather condescending (you knew that from our previous interactions), but here is a microcosm of the image you’re projecting in a single comment:
Your writing is littered with authoritative prescriptions, but you are not a recognized authority on pedagogy. You write as if there’s one way to interpret or learn something, and I find that extremely off-putting.
Hi. I’m his coauthor, both of the book and that blog post. I am, in fact, a trained teacher. I have taught in universities, in technical colleges, in public schools in Japan, and in private schools.
Most of the sentence fragments you’ve picked out are not “authoritative prescriptions” at all; some of them aren’t even prescriptions, and a couple of them are seemingly quite uncontroversial (Haskell is based on a pure typed lambda calculus; if you eventually want to understand how Haskell works to any depth, you really do have to learn to reason in terms of lambda calculus. Perhaps you do not if you do not want to understand how it works under the hood). It’s fine that you don’t like the tone; other people have enjoyed it. And it’s fine if you personally can’t see through the tone to the content, but à chacun son goût.
Neither of us believes there is only way to learn anything. The book has one set of goals and priorities. His guide has another. Other Haskell books try other strategies. The world is generally a better place for having diversity, is it not?
I don’t really see much to disagree with in what you’ve said. My issue is with bitemyapp’s tone in comments here. I see it as condescending and presumptive.
I’ve mentioned at least two just in this thread, with different prerequisites and ideal circumstances. I even went into detail on the second one.
If your point is that you don’t need to learn the semantics of a programming language to understand the programming language, you are making a very controversial point indeed.
Honest question [for bitemyapp] – do you feel the criticisms leveled at you by burntsushi have merit? I honestly agree with ‘em wholeheartedly and have consistently found your comments and tone hard to stomach and extremely off-putting. The thing is – I always thought this was what you intended.
I thought your goal was to be acidic and irritating while popping on every thread that mentions Haskell (or, half the time, doesn’t) to plug your book and be obnoxious so you don’t get ignored. I respected it as a business / marketing play and I think it worked fairly well for you as it was the only reason I poked at your blog and book – because I found you so contemptible.
If it has been you goal, let me compliment you on your effectiveness and skill at it, you are amazing. If it isn’t your goal, you might invest 6 minutes in this video by Sally Kohn (a TED talk): https://youtu.be/NCJTV5KaJJc and consider how much of your message is carried in tone, and more importantly how little of it will get through if your tone is abrasive to the reader.
No, that is not my point. Whether you’re correct or not is irrelevant (for example, I happen to agree with some of your points). My point is that your writing is unapproachable to me because of the number of assumptions littered at every turn about the knowledge and behavior of others. My evidence is the quotation in my previous comment. (The signpost is “you need” or “you did.”)
I’m speaking from observation and experience teaching people Haskell. My coauthor is the real expert, but has never objected in my memory to anything I’ve said about pedagogy.
I’m not going to litter my writing with weasel words just to avoid giving you an excuse to complain. There are exceptions to the rule, that’s not material to my point and they’re uncommon and not densely concentrated in individual learners in my experience.
It’s quite possible to refrain from speaking from authority without using weasel words.
Again, you’re generalizing your experience instead of quantifying it.