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Today's Topics:
1. Re: Haskell as a useful practical 'tool' for intelligent
non-programmers (Lorenzo Bolla)
2. Re: Issue installing reactive-banana-5.0.0.1 (Miguel Negrao)
3. Re: Issue installing reactive-banana-5.0.0.1 (Heinrich Apfelmus)
4. Re: Haskell as a useful practical 'tool' for intelligent
non-programmers (umptious)
5. Re: Haskell as a useful practical 'tool' for intelligent
non-programmers (Nicholas Kormanik)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2012 14:25:27 +0100
From: Lorenzo Bolla <lbo...@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Haskell-beginners] Haskell as a useful practical 'tool'
for intelligent non-programmers
Cc: beginners@haskell.org
Message-ID: <20120428132527.gk1...@dell.home>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
On Fri, Apr 27, 2012 at 02:16:38PM -0600, Nicholas Kormanik wrote:
>
> I am not a programmer, and have no intention of becoming one. I'm a stock
> and options trader. MetaStock is one of the primary programs I use. Other
> statistical and mathematical programs as well.
>
> Very often when some small need arises, I Google-search for a solution.
> There seems to be any number of freeware utilities out there in cyberland --
> and more all the time -- that do pretty much whatever is needed.
>
> Additionally, Mathematica (as one example) has a powerful programming
> language built in.
>
> So, my question is: Does it make practical sense to spend time learning
> Haskell for the purpose of adding it to my assortment of 'tools' -- to
> quickly do this or that, as the need arises?
>
> Is there any better general practical 'tool' (or, if you want, 'programming
> language') to add to my arsenal.
>
> Thanks for your comments and suggestions.
>
> Nicholas Kormanik
I think the choice of which language really depends on the problems you
want to solve. But rest assured: once you've learned the first language,
learning more is simpler...
As a first language, I would definitely go (as I did, in the past) for
Python. The basics are easy to learn, it's great as general purpose
language, it's well supported and has a massive user base.
The standard library is very complete and there are additional high
quality libraries to do mathematical and statistical analysis (google
for numpy, scipy, pandas, pytables, ...). I would choose Python 2.7, and
avoid 3.x to be able to choose from more libraries (just a small subset
have been ported to 3.x).
If you find programming interesting (as we all here do, I believe),
than, once you've familiarized with Python, you should definitely give
Haskell a try: I'm a beginner in Haskell, but I can say it's been the
most enjoyable language to learn so far.
hth,
L.
--
Lorenzo Bolla
http://lbolla.info
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Message: 2
Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2012 14:36:17 +0100
From: Miguel Negrao <miguel.negrao-li...@friendlyvirus.org>
Subject: Re: [Haskell-beginners] Issue installing
reactive-banana-5.0.0.1
To: beginners@haskell.org
Message-ID: <6dd88784-2c30-4e3d-aee0-9e0cf33b7...@friendlyvirus.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
A 28/04/2012, ?s 10:14, Heinrich Apfelmus escreveu:
> Miguel Negrao wrote:
>> Hi
>> It appears I can?t install reactive-banana-5.0.0.1:
>> cabal install reactive-banana
>> Resolving dependencies...
>> cabal: cannot configure mtl-2.1. It requires transformers ==0.3.*
>> For the dependency on transformers ==0.3.* there are these packages:
>> transformers-0.3.0.0. However none of them are available.
>> transformers-0.3.0.0 was excluded because reactive-banana-0.5.0.1 requires
>> transformers ==0.2.*
>> How can I solve this ?
>
> I have uploaded reactive-banana-0.5.0.2 which relaxes the version
> constraint on the transformers package. Try the new version.
Ok, it installs now, thanks.
I had a try again at running the examples of reactive-banana-wx. I unpacked
reactive-banana-wx-0.5.0.0. I have installed wx and wxcore version 0.13.1,
that?s what I managed to install at some point (I think there were some issue
with OSX Lion on previous versions). So I changed the cabal setup of
reactive-banana-wx-0.5.0.0 to wx==0.13.1, wxcore==0.13.1 and then did 'cabal
install -fbuildExamples? and everything builds. Most of the examples run fine,
although the resize of the window is completely hacky, all the widgets assume
strange proportion and become almost unusable
(http://img440.imageshack.us/img440/1149/capturadeecr20120428s14.png) . The
asteroids app (which was the one I wanted to have look at) the window becomes
just a couple pixels, so I can?t see anything
(http://img33.imageshack.us/img33/1149/capturadeecr20120428s14.png). Is there a
problem in using wx 0.13.1 ?
Btw, wx 0.90 "Builds and runs cleanly on 64 bit platforms (particularly MacOS X
Lion)?. Would reactive-banana-wx work with wx0.9.0 ?
best,
Miguel
------------------------------
Message: 3
Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2012 16:50:15 +0200
From: Heinrich Apfelmus <apfel...@quantentunnel.de>
Subject: Re: [Haskell-beginners] Issue installing
reactive-banana-5.0.0.1
To: beginners@haskell.org
Message-ID: <jnh038$q8l$1...@dough.gmane.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
Miguel Negrao wrote:
> I had a try again at running the examples of reactive-banana-wx. I
> unpacked reactive-banana-wx-0.5.0.0. I have installed wx and wxcore
> version 0.13.1, that?s what I managed to install at some point (I
> think there were some issue with OSX Lion on previous versions). So I
> changed the cabal setup of reactive-banana-wx-0.5.0.0 to wx==0.13.1,
> wxcore==0.13.1 and then did 'cabal install -fbuildExamples? and
> everything builds. Most of the examples run fine, although the resize
> of the window is completely hacky, all the widgets assume strange
> proportion and become almost unusable
> (http://img440.imageshack.us/img440/1149/capturadeecr20120428s14.png)
> . The asteroids app (which was the one I wanted to have look at) the
> window becomes just a couple pixels, so I can?t see anything
> (http://img33.imageshack.us/img33/1149/capturadeecr20120428s14.png).
> Is there a problem in using wx 0.13.1 ? Btw, wx 0.90 "Builds and runs
> cleanly on 64 bit platforms (particularly MacOS X Lion)?. Would
> reactive-banana-wx work with wx0.9.0 ?
Ah, it looks like your version of wx got linked with wxWidgets 2.9.3
instead of wxWidgets 2.8 . This introduces various issues, in particular
the ones you ran into.
If you just want to try a few examples with wxWidgets 2.9.3, you can
install reactive-banana-0.6.0.0 and the corresponding -wx packages from
the master branch at
https://github.com/HeinrichApfelmus/reactive-banana
This should work with wx-0.90 (though some examples crash), but I can't
give any guarantees whether the official 0.6 version that I'm going to
release on hackage will have the exact same API.
That said, I'm basically just waiting for Jeremy to release a small
patch to wx on hackage that fixes some of these issues (for instance the
strangely minimized text entries and the crashes). After that, I'm going
to release reactive-banana-0.6.0.0 that depends on wx-0.90.
Best regards,
Heinrich Apfelmus
--
http://apfelmus.nfshost.com
------------------------------
Message: 4
Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2012 16:38:54 +0100
From: umptious <umpti...@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Haskell-beginners] Haskell as a useful practical 'tool'
for intelligent non-programmers
To: nkorma...@gmail.com
Cc: beginners@haskell.org
Message-ID:
<cae20bnvyq_wp4xr7ehh8fyh8snox9do4qgby6e+eihwyqeu...@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
On 27 April 2012 21:16, Nicholas Kormanik <nkorma...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> So, my question is: Does it make practical sense to spend time learning
> Haskell for the purpose of adding it to my assortment of 'tools' -- to
> quickly do this or that, as the need arises?
>
> Is there any better general practical 'tool' (or, if you want, 'programming
> language') to add to my arsenal.
>
No one can give you advice on what tool to use without knowing what the
task or who you are in more detail than you provided. And you're often
better with several tools than "general" one - trying to saw with a hammer
isn't easy.
Unless you're unusually smart in the IQ sense and/or have a maths or formal
logic background, then I'd say that Haskell would be a miserable choice for
a first programming language.
As for tools you might look at for tasks that I ***guess*** that a trader
is likely to want to do:
- For web scraping and text mining, Groovy, Clojure, Ruby, Python and
(maybe) Perl are reasonable choices
- For both number crunching and symbolic maths, look at sagemaths (which is
scripted in Python) - it's a reasonable free alternative to both Matlab
(number crunching) and Mathematic (symbolics)
..Which I suppose makes Python the no-brainer choice. Python is easy to
learn, the community is supportive, there are lots of reasonable books and
tutorials. I think it also has stuff around for working with Excel
spreadsheets, which I'd imagine you might want to do.
Haskell is actually a better language than any of the above (leaving aside
learnability and without defining "better") but for real world use
libraries count more than language features. It would take you years to
write the equivalent of sagemaths in Haskell, which rather negates
Haskell's advantages if you need that functionality.
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Message: 5
Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2012 15:50:36 -0600
From: "Nicholas Kormanik" <nkorma...@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Haskell-beginners] Haskell as a useful practical 'tool'
for intelligent non-programmers
To: <beginners@haskell.org>
Message-ID: <001501cd2588$f31f7f00$d95e7d00$@gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Greatly appreciate your sharing these thoughts.
A bit frustrating that you mention four as candidates: "Groovy, Clojure,
Ruby, Python."
But it sounds like you are leaning toward recommending Python as the best
way to start.
Nicholas
From: umptious [mailto:umpti...@gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, April 28, 2012 9:39 AM
To: nkorma...@gmail.com
Cc: beginners@haskell.org
Subject: Re: [Haskell-beginners] Haskell as a useful practical 'tool' for
intelligent non-programmers
On 27 April 2012 21:16, Nicholas Kormanik <nkorma...@gmail.com> wrote:
So, my question is: Does it make practical sense to spend time learning
Haskell for the purpose of adding it to my assortment of 'tools' -- to
quickly do this or that, as the need arises?
Is there any better general practical 'tool' (or, if you want, 'programming
language') to add to my arsenal.
No one can give you advice on what tool to use without knowing what the task
or who you are in more detail than you provided. And you're often better
with several tools than "general" one - trying to saw with a hammer isn't
easy.
Unless you're unusually smart in the IQ sense and/or have a maths or formal
logic background, then I'd say that Haskell would be a miserable choice for
a first programming language.
As for tools you might look at for tasks that I ***guess*** that a trader is
likely to want to do:
- For web scraping and text mining, Groovy, Clojure, Ruby, Python and
(maybe) Perl are reasonable choices
- For both number crunching and symbolic maths, look at sagemaths (which is
scripted in Python) - it's a reasonable free alternative to both Matlab
(number crunching) and Mathematic (symbolics)
..Which I suppose makes Python the no-brainer choice. Python is easy to
learn, the community is supportive, there are lots of reasonable books and
tutorials. I think it also has stuff around for working with Excel
spreadsheets, which I'd imagine you might want to do.
Haskell is actually a better language than any of the above (leaving aside
learnability and without defining "better") but for real world use libraries
count more than language features. It would take you years to write the
equivalent of sagemaths in Haskell, which rather negates Haskell's
advantages if you need that functionality.
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