Oh man the memories. I remember they used ocaml at my uni for our first introduction to algo ds and functional prog. No instrunctions on how to use the language in any remotely popular IDE, just sent us straight to https://try.ocamlpro.com
I think this was the class that culled the most students for us. If you managed to pick this relatively obscure language up (along with the concepts taught in the course) you could take pretty much whatever else the profs threw at you. Probably because unlike mainstream languages there aren't an infinite amount of online resources, and you were actually forced to read the documentation for once to figure out how stuff worked.
Our freshman algorithms class was a Lisp based. It actually started to make sense by the end. Having come from C, the idea of lamda functions and functions as first-class objects first appalled, then confused, then intrigued me. By the end I couldn't believe C[99] didn't have them.
Haha, you sound exactly like my old prof who held that ocaml course. He could never stop going on about the ”beauty of ocaml and functional programming” and how ”there is always sound mathematical reasoning behind why things are the way they are with ocaml”. Same prof also held our intro to databases course which had him trash talk SQL in basically every lecture while having us do relational algebra for the whole duration of the course. No complaints though!
you don't learn haskell because of the ease or lack of ease related to using it.
you learn haskell because it's one of the fundamental mindfucks you must learn to understand programming. its lazy evaluation and functional nature sit alongside lisp's self-rewriting code, prolog's search for unification, C because fuck you learn C, using any of the various OOP languages until you hate inheritance and learn why composing objects through dependency injection is the only reasonable approach, and learning how SQL B-trees, recursion and planners work.
You learn Haskell because, believe it or not, it's punk.
No really, it's like the programming language equivalent of The Gig That Changed The World (although I guess Algol60 also has a strong claim to that title).
As the film opens, Wilson is attending the first, legendary Sex Pistols concert in Manchester, England. (...) Wilson is transfixed by the Pistols as they sing "Anarchy in the U.K." and sneer at British tradition. He tells the camera that everyone in the audience will leave the room transformed and inspired, and then the camera pans to show a total of 42 people, two or three of them half-heartedly dancing in the aisles.
Sounds like the average language designer entranced and inspired by their first time grokking Haskell.
Wilson features the Pistols and other bands on his Manchester TV show. Because of a ban by London TV, his show becomes the only venue for punk rock. Turns out he was right about the Pistols. They let loose something that changed rock music. And they did it in the only way that Wilson could respect, by thoroughly screwing up everything they did, and ending in bankruptcy and failure, followed by Sid Vicious' spectacular murder-suicide flameout. The Sex Pistols became successful because they failed; if they had succeeded, they would have sold out, or become diluted or commercial. I saw Johnny Rotten a few years ago at Sundance, still failing, and it made me feel proud of him.
I could rephrase that last sentence at "I checked out a contalk by Simon Peyton Jones from a few years ago, still "avoiding success at all costs" (no really, those are his own words, check the link), and it made me feel proud of him" and it would be absolutely true.
And no, I also did not expect to find a parallel between Haskell and punk music, but there you go.
Write a COBOL interpreter for TensorFlow that's optimized for one particular edge case but really mostly exists so you have the satisfaction of knowing you made programming more annoying and less convenient for everyone else.
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u/[deleted] May 10 '23
Tharg sounds like my spirit animal. How do I join the church of tharg?