[Haskell-cafe] Re: Is www.haskell.org down?

2008-08-14 Thread Don Stewart
By the way, for those wondering why Jon Harrop would say such an unusual
thing on the Haskell list, have a look at his contributions over on the
OCaml list,

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.caml.general/43430

Some choice quotes:

   almost all of the examples of Haskell's use in industry are fakes

   nobody has ever done anything significant using Haskell

Jon's the primary source of FUD against Haskell and its community, as he
goes around promoting his site in other functional programming
communities. This kind of behaviour's been going on for a few years now,
sadly.

It's all rather disappointing.

-- Don
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: Is www.haskell.org down?

2008-08-14 Thread Gianfranco Alongi
This is ... disturbing.

On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 7:57 PM, Don Stewart [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 By the way, for those wondering why Jon Harrop would say such an unusual
 thing on the Haskell list, have a look at his contributions over on the
 OCaml list,

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.caml.general/43430

 Some choice quotes:

   almost all of the examples of Haskell's use in industry are fakes

   nobody has ever done anything significant using Haskell

 Jon's the primary source of FUD against Haskell and its community, as he
 goes around promoting his site in other functional programming
 communities. This kind of behaviour's been going on for a few years now,
 sadly.

 It's all rather disappointing.

 -- Don
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Patience is the last resort for those unable to take action
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: Is www.haskell.org down?

2008-08-14 Thread Ketil Malde
Don Stewart [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 By the way, for those wondering why Jon Harrop would say such an unusual
 thing on the Haskell list, have a look at his contributions over on the
 OCaml list,

 http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.caml.general/43430

Well, to be perfectly honest:

|  What are the advantages/disadvantages when comparing OCaml to Haskell?
| 
| Techically, predictable performance, high performance on x64, tools like 
| camlp4 and language features including records, functors, polymorphic 
| variants and structurally-typed objects are probably the main advantages of 
| OCaml over Haskell.

I think we can match language features with classes, concurrency,
GADTs, STM, and so on.  Predictable performance is a point, especially
memory-wise. At least, I sometimes get surprises when a usage pattern
causes too much or too little laziness.  GHC uses a *lot* of memory in
general, and in particular on 64 bits.

I belive OCaml has a simpler semantics, and thus it is easier to
optimize performance, especially for a beginner.  Decent programmers
get decent performance with Haskell, see e.g. the language shootout.

| Non-technically, OCaml has more well-tested libraries, more practical books 
| (e.g. my own), more high-profile open source projects (e.g. FFTW has millions 
| of users)

I'm not so sure about the library thing, it seems that Haskell has a
bigger community, and while some libraries are less maintained than
one would wish, some are pretty solid.  Clearly, OCaml has been used
in some serious settings, although I don't see why the number of users
of one particular application should be significant to me.

| There are far more practically-minded people in the OCaml community
| and that is reflected in the much larger number of commercial
| products that use OCaml.

This almost reads as damning with faint praise.  Do we have the 
educated, smart people, and a larger number of open source products?

| Tangentially, OCaml has a successful relative in F# whereas
| Haskell's close relatives are extinct.

Or you could say that OCaml is one member of a family of languages,
each slightly different, while Haskell managed to unify the
ecosystem and community around a single standard.  It would bear
pointing out that just about every new, cool feature in emerging
languages seem to come from Haskell. 

| nobody has ever done anything significant using Haskell

He is entitled to his opinion of what is significant or not, just as I
am entitled to my opinion of his opinion.

-k
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants
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[Haskell-cafe] Re: Is www.haskell.org down?

2008-08-14 Thread Chad Scherrer
Don Stewart dons at galois.com writes:
 Some choice quotes:
 
almost all of the examples of Haskell's use in industry are fakes
 
nobody has ever done anything significant using Haskell
 
 Jon's the primary source of FUD against Haskell and its community, as he
 goes around promoting his site in other functional programming
 communities. This kind of behaviour's been going on for a few years now,
 sadly.

Maybe trolls are just an unfortunate growing pain. Never see those in purely
academic languages.

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: Is www.haskell.org down?

2008-08-14 Thread Jon Harrop
On Thursday 14 August 2008 19:52:06 Ketil Malde wrote:
 Don Stewart [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
  http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.caml.general/43430

 Well, to be perfectly honest:
 |  What are the advantages/disadvantages when comparing OCaml to Haskell?
 |
 | Techically, predictable performance, high performance on x64, tools like
 | camlp4 and language features including records, functors, polymorphic
 | variants and structurally-typed objects are probably the main advantages
 | of OCaml over Haskell.

 I think we can match language features with classes, concurrency,
 GADTs, STM, and so on.  Predictable performance is a point, especially
 memory-wise. At least, I sometimes get surprises when a usage pattern
 causes too much or too little laziness.  GHC uses a *lot* of memory in
 general, and in particular on 64 bits.

Yes. Compilation speed as well.

 I belive OCaml has a simpler semantics, and thus it is easier to
 optimize performance, especially for a beginner.  Decent programmers
 get decent performance with Haskell, see e.g. the language shootout.

Isn't Darcs an obvious counter example?

 | Non-technically, OCaml has more well-tested libraries, more practical
 | books (e.g. my own), more high-profile open source projects (e.g. FFTW
 | has millions of users)

 I'm not so sure about the library thing, it seems that Haskell has a
 bigger community,

What gave you that impression?

According to the Debian and Ubuntu package popularity contest results, OCaml 
currently has 10,635 registered installs compared to 6,606 for GHC. Moreover, 
this ratio has been constant for several years now.

 and while some libraries are less maintained than 
 one would wish, some are pretty solid.  Clearly, OCaml has been used
 in some serious settings, although I don't see why the number of users
 of one particular application should be significant to me.

There are data for more applications, of course:

Debian and Ubuntu registered installs
-
184,574: FFTW   ( 14,298 lines of OCaml)
 12,866: Unison ( 23,993 lines of OCaml)
  7,286: MLDonkey   (171,332 lines of OCaml)
  4,365: Darcs  (  3,939 lines of Haskell)
  4,066: FreeTennis (  7,419 lines of OCaml)
  4,057: Planets(  3,296 lines of OCaml)
  3,465: HPodder(  2,225 lines of Haskell)
  2,965: LEdit  (  2,048 lines of OCaml)
  2,822: Hevea  ( 11,596 lines of OCaml)
  2,657: Polygen(  1,331 lines of OCaml)

That is 221,293 installs of popular OCaml software compared to only 7,830 
installs of Haskell software.

And 235,312 lines of OCaml code tested by many users compared to only 6,164 
lines of well-tested Haskell code.

 | There are far more practically-minded people in the OCaml community
 | and that is reflected in the much larger number of commercial
 | products that use OCaml.

 This almost reads as damning with faint praise.  Do we have the
 educated, smart people, and a larger number of open source products?

The above statistics certainly that OCaml has four times as many popular open 
source projects as Haskell.

 | Tangentially, OCaml has a successful relative in F# whereas
 | Haskell's close relatives are extinct.

 Or you could say that OCaml is one member of a family of languages,
 each slightly different, while Haskell managed to unify the
 ecosystem and community around a single standard.

Or you could say that the only popular Haskell is GHC's proprietary dialect.

Either way, I think it is clear that OCaml has more users than GHC and 
OCaml+F# have far more users than all Haskell dialects combined.

 It would bear pointing out that just about every new, cool feature in
 emerging languages seem to come from Haskell.

Like F#'s active patterns?

 | nobody has ever done anything significant using Haskell

 He is entitled to his opinion of what is significant or not, just as I
 am entitled to my opinion of his opinion.

Have any open source projects written in Haskell ever garnered a significant 
number of users?

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: Is www.haskell.org down?

2008-08-14 Thread Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH


On Aug 14, 2008, at 16:05 , Jon Harrop wrote:


(spew)


Where exactly did we pick up this, er, individual?  Would they please  
take it back as defective?


--
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon universityKF8NH


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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: Is www.haskell.org down?

2008-08-14 Thread John Van Enk
Generally, I'm fine with this kind of conversation, but this is obviously
not going to lead to anything useful (and seemingly, this is intentional).
I'd suggest killing this thread so that more useful conversation can receive
focus.

/jve

On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 4:05 PM, Jon Harrop [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 On Thursday 14 August 2008 19:52:06 Ketil Malde wrote:
  Don Stewart [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.caml.general/43430
 
  Well, to be perfectly honest:
  |  What are the advantages/disadvantages when comparing OCaml to
 Haskell?
  |
  | Techically, predictable performance, high performance on x64, tools
 like
  | camlp4 and language features including records, functors, polymorphic
  | variants and structurally-typed objects are probably the main
 advantages
  | of OCaml over Haskell.
 
  I think we can match language features with classes, concurrency,
  GADTs, STM, and so on.  Predictable performance is a point, especially
  memory-wise. At least, I sometimes get surprises when a usage pattern
  causes too much or too little laziness.  GHC uses a *lot* of memory in
  general, and in particular on 64 bits.

 Yes. Compilation speed as well.

  I belive OCaml has a simpler semantics, and thus it is easier to
  optimize performance, especially for a beginner.  Decent programmers
  get decent performance with Haskell, see e.g. the language shootout.

 Isn't Darcs an obvious counter example?

  | Non-technically, OCaml has more well-tested libraries, more practical
  | books (e.g. my own), more high-profile open source projects (e.g. FFTW
  | has millions of users)
 
  I'm not so sure about the library thing, it seems that Haskell has a
  bigger community,

 What gave you that impression?

 According to the Debian and Ubuntu package popularity contest results,
 OCaml
 currently has 10,635 registered installs compared to 6,606 for GHC.
 Moreover,
 this ratio has been constant for several years now.

  and while some libraries are less maintained than
  one would wish, some are pretty solid.  Clearly, OCaml has been used
  in some serious settings, although I don't see why the number of users
  of one particular application should be significant to me.

 There are data for more applications, of course:

 Debian and Ubuntu registered installs
 -
 184,574: FFTW   ( 14,298 lines of OCaml)
  12,866: Unison ( 23,993 lines of OCaml)
  7,286: MLDonkey   (171,332 lines of OCaml)
  4,365: Darcs  (  3,939 lines of Haskell)
  4,066: FreeTennis (  7,419 lines of OCaml)
  4,057: Planets(  3,296 lines of OCaml)
  3,465: HPodder(  2,225 lines of Haskell)
  2,965: LEdit  (  2,048 lines of OCaml)
  2,822: Hevea  ( 11,596 lines of OCaml)
  2,657: Polygen(  1,331 lines of OCaml)

 That is 221,293 installs of popular OCaml software compared to only 7,830
 installs of Haskell software.

 And 235,312 lines of OCaml code tested by many users compared to only 6,164
 lines of well-tested Haskell code.

  | There are far more practically-minded people in the OCaml community
  | and that is reflected in the much larger number of commercial
  | products that use OCaml.
 
  This almost reads as damning with faint praise.  Do we have the
  educated, smart people, and a larger number of open source products?

 The above statistics certainly that OCaml has four times as many popular
 open
 source projects as Haskell.

  | Tangentially, OCaml has a successful relative in F# whereas
  | Haskell's close relatives are extinct.
 
  Or you could say that OCaml is one member of a family of languages,
  each slightly different, while Haskell managed to unify the
  ecosystem and community around a single standard.

 Or you could say that the only popular Haskell is GHC's proprietary
 dialect.

 Either way, I think it is clear that OCaml has more users than GHC and
 OCaml+F# have far more users than all Haskell dialects combined.

  It would bear pointing out that just about every new, cool feature in
  emerging languages seem to come from Haskell.

 Like F#'s active patterns?

  | nobody has ever done anything significant using Haskell
 
  He is entitled to his opinion of what is significant or not, just as I
  am entitled to my opinion of his opinion.

 Have any open source projects written in Haskell ever garnered a
 significant
 number of users?

 --
 Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
 http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e
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-- 
/jve
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: Is www.haskell.org down?

2008-08-14 Thread Don Stewart
jon:
  I'm not so sure about the library thing, it seems that Haskell has a
  bigger community,
 
 What gave you that impression?
 
 According to the Debian and Ubuntu package popularity contest results, OCaml 
 currently has 10,635 registered installs compared to 6,606 for GHC. Moreover, 
 this ratio has been constant for several years now.

Why, say, do we see the following results:

* The #haskell IRC channel contains 500 people, the #ocaml channel 70?

* 250 unique  developers have uploaded 600 new libraries to 
hackage.haskell.org in the past year.
  How's the Caml Hump going?

* On Arch Linux, we find 480 Haskell packages and tools, but only 21
  for OCaml. Why the difference?

* The caml-list had 315 posts for June, 08, while haskell-cafe had
  over 1400

Your statistics focus soley on the Debian-based distribution statitics,
which have had an active OCaml group for several years now. What do the
registered install stats look like, on say, Arch Linux, or Gentoo?

-- Don
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: Is www.haskell.org down?

2008-08-14 Thread Thomas Schilling
Don't feed the (incredibly obvious) troll.  He's doing no-one any
good--not even to the O'Caml community.  Haskell can learn from
O'Caml, O'Caml can learn from Haskell.  I also think that most users
of either language actually know that.

On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 10:20 PM, Don Stewart [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 jon:
  I'm not so sure about the library thing, it seems that Haskell has a
  bigger community,

 What gave you that impression?

 According to the Debian and Ubuntu package popularity contest results, OCaml
 currently has 10,635 registered installs compared to 6,606 for GHC. Moreover,
 this ratio has been constant for several years now.

 Why, say, do we see the following results:

* The #haskell IRC channel contains 500 people, the #ocaml channel 70?

* 250 unique  developers have uploaded 600 new libraries to 
 hackage.haskell.org in the past year.
  How's the Caml Hump going?

* On Arch Linux, we find 480 Haskell packages and tools, but only 21
  for OCaml. Why the difference?

* The caml-list had 315 posts for June, 08, while haskell-cafe had
  over 1400

 Your statistics focus soley on the Debian-based distribution statitics,
 which have had an active OCaml group for several years now. What do the
 registered install stats look like, on say, Arch Linux, or Gentoo?

 -- Don
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: Is www.haskell.org down?

2008-08-14 Thread Donn Cave
Quoth Thomas Schilling [EMAIL PROTECTED]:

| ...  Haskell can learn from
| O'Caml, O'Caml can learn from Haskell.  I also think that most users
| of either language actually know that.

I'd like to start with a name for it.

 - Objective CAML  (name of the language)
 - ocaml  (name of the compiler)
 - OCaml  (expedient name for language)

I'm always a little piqued by O'Caml, since I was so fond of O'Haskell.
Now, there was a real Irishman.

Donn
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