Haskell Researchers Announce Discovery of Industry Programmer Who Gives a Shit

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/12/haskell-researchers-announce-discovery.html

by pchristensen • 16 years ago

429 109 16 years ago

steve-yegge.blogspot.com

angusgr2• 16 years ago

I chuckled, and I'm happy Steve Yegge might blog some more, but this feels a bit like shooting fish in a barrel.

zaphar• 16 years ago

As a "sort of" haskell programmer recently I admit I found it quite funny.

joshes• 16 years ago

If only because you could fit all of the Haskell programmers into a barrel of standard size? I think that's the point of the article, actually.

angusgr2• 16 years ago

More because it's easy to poke fun at Haskell in this way, even the Haskell people know they come off as obtuse and academic. AFAIK there's been much soul-searching in their community about how to get past that.

While Steve Yegge is a good satirist, I see this post as an extended version of this joke from the "Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages":

Haskell gets some resistance due to the complexity of using monads to control side effects. Wadler tries to appease critics by explaining that "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?"

csantini• 16 years ago

"Finding a person who gives a shit about Haskell is an inherently NP-complete computer science problem. It's similar in scope and complexity to the problem of trying to find a tenured academic who didn't have the bulk of his or her work done by uncredited graduate students."

tessro• 16 years ago

Surely you could implement this search in at least O(n) time?

eru5• 16 years ago

At least is easy. At most is hard.

aperiodic• 16 years ago

That's assuming that you can verify whether or not any given person gives a shit about Haskell in O(1) time.

nickik2• 16 years ago

"I believe the root cause of the popularity problem is Haskell's lack of reasonable support for mutually recursive generic container types." -- Super funny!

j_baker4• 16 years ago

"If we can create a monadic composition-functor wrapper that is perceived as sufficiently sexy by hardened industry veterans, then I think we will see an uptick in giving a shit, possibly as much as a full extra person."

j_baker4• 16 years ago

"We crafted a fake satirical post lampooning Haskell as an unusable, overly complex turd -- a writing task that was emotionally difficult but conceptually trivial." - This is pure gold.

samstokes• 16 years ago

The only thing I liked about the article was the implied possibility of that sentence being self-referential.

gvb2• 16 years ago

On the "truth is stranger than fiction" front, I got a good chuckle from the monads-in-Perl link http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=620692:

"Anyway, I think it would be worth doing, if it could be expressed readably, but I was not able to figure out a way to do that."

There is some deep irony in monads in Perl not being readable enough for Perl.

JoachimSchipper3• 16 years ago

Actually, the "modern Perl" people are promoting a Perl style where your program contains more letters than special characters. They seem quite influential.

alphaoverlord• 16 years ago

Sniff sniff. Whats that smell? O right, Onion worthy.

mixmax• 16 years ago

If Douglas Adams were to write about programming this is how he would do it.

That's a compliment.

yters2• 16 years ago

Or the Onion. Not as much of a compliment...

snth2• 16 years ago

I agree that this seems to be exactly in the style of an Onion article; however, I think The Onion has put out some hilarious stuff. For example:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/fuck-everything-were-doing-...

presidentender• 16 years ago

Will there every be a satirical Steve Yegge post on HN that spawns any discussion other than quotes from the article itself?

derefr• 16 years ago

That's what makes Yegge posts so long, I think: he thinks of everything people could say in response to his original "core" post, and then includes it in the post itself.

codexon2• 16 years ago

dons2• 16 years ago

Diatribes?

codexon2• 16 years ago

Stop pretending Dons. It is quite amusing that you are voted up 5 times for such a content-less comment yet you and your associates are powerless to downvote the article.

brian62• 16 years ago

This successfully trolled me, because I think Haskell is really good stuff made by really smart and cool people. Surely there was a better target for satire.

I'm an industry programmer (in C). I also have a bunch of packages on Hackage.

wtracy• 16 years ago

Are you sure it's not making fun of the people who don't use Haskell?

jmillikin10• 16 years ago

140 points? Really?

I know it's fashionable in these parts to make fun of Haskell, but it's just not funny unless the writer knows something about the language. Would you upvote these articles?

* Why C++ is More Object-Oriented Than Smalltalk

* Stupid Ivory-Tower Academics Claim "Perl Is Too Slow for Weather Simulation"

* LISP: It Would Be a Lot More Useful Without All the Parentheses

It's especially galling considering pg's various articles on language expressiveness; remember this quote, folks?

"""As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the power continuum, he knows he's looking down. Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used to. But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub."""

When somebody tosses around phrases like how to subvert Haskell's type system to accomplish basic shit you can do in other languages, it's a big red flag that they've never used Haskell, and possibly have never even seen Haskell code.

pavelludiq• 16 years ago

I don't believe this article was meant to make fun of Haskell, more to make fun of Haskell fans lack of a sense of humor. Don't take it too seriously.

jmillikin10• 16 years ago

I'm not taking it seriously, I'm just sort of baffled about it.

If this were an article talking about how FORTRAN is never used in industry because punch cards are too expensive, it would garner a few votes before being eventually buried. Perhaps one or two quick comments about how the author is uninformed.

Ditto somebody making fun of Erlang because nobody's written a web browser in it yet, or elaborating on why Python's poor industry adoption is because of mandatory whitespace.

There's a lot of material that could go into a satire on Haskell. For example, one could mention its extant-but-completely-useless shared library support. Or how quick midnight hacks end up becoming part of the language's standard definition. Or even the absolute absurdity of a package publishing system that mandates bumping your package version every time a dependency has a new release.

But he doesn't talk about any of that; anybody who's bothered to google for "haskell" has read his material on half a dozen blogs. "Monads are hard" is right up there with "why shouldn't I just make everything global?" in the list of topics useful for juicing pagerank, but nothing more.

JoachimSchipper3• 16 years ago

There have been "alternate syntax for Lisp" articles on the front page of HN, at least...

revorad• 16 years ago

Haskell researcher Javier Escuella remains hopeful that one day they may be able to double or even triple the number of industry programmers who give a shit about Haskell.

Wow, even Javier wouldn't have guessed the number would double so soon!

aplusbi2• 16 years ago

Haskell is listed under Steve's "Favorite Languages", along with OCaml, Clojure, Common Lisp ans Scheme.

I don't think Steve is trying to make fun of Haskell so much as the idea of Haskell.

Goladus3• 16 years ago

Actually I think he's making fun of the people who take Haskell really seriously.

raganwald3• 16 years ago

I think it's great that you've tried to provide a review criticizing this post. But please resist the urge to tell me what I ought to find funny, just as I have resisted the urge to tell you what you ought to find interesting.

Especially resist the urge to criticize others for liking things you find unworthy. Your comment's criticism of the OP is appreciated. Your comment's criticism of other members for voting for the post is, well, something else entirely.

jmillikin10• 16 years ago

Surely there are better places to post funny but thought-free links than Hacker News?

niels_olson• 16 years ago

please resist the urge to tell me what I ought to <verb>. Oh, wait . . .

chollida1• 16 years ago

> 140 points? Really?

I think some of these votes are purely because the author is a very recognizable name who hasn't blogged in a while.

I for one broke out into a smile when I saw a new yegge blog post.

edanm• 16 years ago

Absolutely. I'll blindly upvote any post by a respected name, simply because I'm always, always going to read their post. And I assume others are like me, and will want to be informed when a new "Yegge" comes out.

xi5• 16 years ago

When somebody tosses around phrases like how to subvert Haskell's type system to accomplish basic shit you can do in other languages, it's a big red flag that they've never used Haskell, and possibly have never even seen Haskell code.

IMO, it proves exactly the opposite; a person could never say it unless they at least tried to write some Haskell code.

jmillikin10• 16 years ago

Subverting the type system is roughly equivalent to embedding assembly in C; possibly useful for very special cases, but almost never done otherwise. It's certainly not required to do anything commonplace.

statictype• 16 years ago

Well, actually, unless you've tried using Haskell you probably don't realize the it has a type system completely different from 'other languages'.

About Blub: That's a stick you can use to beat anybody who criticizes any other language. Oh, you don't think Brainfuck has anything to offer? Hah! Go read pg's essay on blub!

jmillikin10• 16 years ago

Well, actually, unless you've tried using Haskell you probably don't realize the it has a type system completely different from 'other languages'.

Really? Before I started using it, the only things I knew about Haskell were 1) it has a weird type system 2) it uses something called 'monads' and 3) doing IO is really really hard.

#3 turned out to be false, #2 was true but not as scary as the hype, and #1 was true.

It's not surprising that non-users know about the "odd" type system; types are one of the few ways arbitrary languages can be compared, so I know the type systems of many languages I've never so much as written Hello World in.

About Blub: That's a stick you can use to beat anybody who criticizes any other language.

Not so; one can use it to criticize anybody who claims a language is bad because it is more expressive than usual.

For example, there are languages with more expressive type systems than even Haskell; if a programmer used to such language called Haskell inexpressive, it wouldn't make any sense to argue against them with Blub (regardless of whether he's correct).

eru5• 16 years ago

> completely different from 'other languages'.

It's not too different from OCaml or Clean. (Though, I do miss type classes in them.)

j_baker4• 16 years ago

Actually, I probably would upvote those.

I don't see the target of this post being Haskell itself. I see it as being the Haskell community. I see the thesis as being that Haskell has an undeservedly bad reputation and that its community doesn't really do anything to help by being elitist and disconnected from industry.

dkarl• 16 years ago

Actually, I saw their concern for industry being the target of the humor. Haskell is what it is; for the Haskell community to worry about industrial relevance is a funny, un-self-aware and touchingly pathetic "me too" reflex, like Bill Gates worrying about his pick-up skills or Bill Clinton wondering if his wife trusts him around other women.

(Sorry if that sounds overly political. I'm not a Bill Clinton hater or even disliker, but it's a perfect example and I just can't resist.)

eru5• 16 years ago

I've been to some events of the Haskell community and hang out on the Haskll cafe mailing list. They don't seem elitist to me, and are quite fond of connections to industry. Where do you get those notions?

Homunculiheaded• 16 years ago

While I don't use Haskell that often to solve problems, I have a lot of interest in the language. I've given talks on why Haskell is important to groups of very average, very 'real world' programmers and it is precisely because of that that I found this piece hilarious. This isn't mean spirited attack on the language, it's making fun of the condition of being a Haskell evangelist more than anything else.

seasoup• 16 years ago

Articles fake, jmillikins comment only has 24 points right now, not 38.

cdavid• 16 years ago

A few years ago (when Steve was still @ amazon), ocaml was one of his favorite language, and AFAIK, ocaml and haskell are the two most proeminent languages with a powerful type system. I think it is fair to say he has at least some vague idea of what he is talking about, even though it seems that in the recent years he was more enclined to go the dynamic typing route (again, only judging from his blog)

brown9-2• 16 years ago

This is HN, we love Steve Yegge.

ecuzzillo• 16 years ago

Would you rather read another rallying cry about WikiLeaks?

Goladus3• 16 years ago

Your response is predictable and completely devoid of new ideas in addition to not being funny. I don't think it was even worth 4 but you've got over 30. Whatever. That's the way the system works.

The three sample article titles you offer are not even analogous to the original post. Yegge's title is a humorous re-working of the phrase "nobody gives a shit about Haskell," the subject of the article. Your suggestions are analogous to half-assed critiques of the language itself.

And again, they weren't funny. For example, instead of "LISP: It Would Be a Lot More Useful Without All the Parentheses" try something like:

    * Scheme is an exotic sports car. Fast. Manual transmission. No radio.

    * Emacs Lisp is a 1984 Subaru GL 4WD: "the car that's always in front of you."

    * Common Lisp is Howl's Moving Castle.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/11/ejacs-javascript-int...

jmillikin10• 16 years ago

My response was not supposed to be funny; it's a critique of an uninformed article.

None of your title suggestions match mine, because yours are true. Scheme is simple and no-frills; elisp is outdated and utilitarian. Common Lisp is...well, it's not Japanese, so he's lost me there.

But implying that Haskell is unsuited or unused for industrial purposes is absurd; most major Haskell libraries are written for companies, the main compilers are developed by companies, most papers are about solving some particular industrial problem, etc. Yegge's article might as well be about how nobody uses Erlang or Forth, it would make equally little sense.

Hell, the industry Yegge specifically calls out (finance) is known to use Haskell more than usual; Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America, and Credit Suisse especially. Barclays even released a paper detailing their experiences!

gphil• 16 years ago

I think you're taking the article way too literally, especially considering who the author is (almost all of Yegge's rants are sarcastic or contain large amounts of sarcasm.) The dig isn't on Haskell, it's more on "industry" if anything.

I read it as more a satirical lamentation regarding the relatively low adoption of Haskell outside of academic-leaning circles. I, for one, upvoted the article and think that the upvotes are justified. I felt that the article held literary value and espoused an interesting and humorous (if a bit brash) take on this situation.

If you google around, it would seem that most professional Haskell programmers are PhD holders, and I think the point he is trying to convey is that this is a somewhat unfortunate situation given the power and potential of the language.

davidmathers• 16 years ago

"Avoid success at all costs."

I mentioned this at a talk I gave about Haskell a few years back and it’s become quite widely quoted. When a language becomes too well known, or too widely used and too successful suddenly you can’t change anything anymore. You get caught and spend ages talking about things that have nothing to do with the research side of things. Success is great, but it comes at a price. -- Simon Peyton Jones

natmaster• 16 years ago

Facebook uses haskell.

https://www.facebook.com/careers/puzzles.php (They only accept answers in languages they actually use.)

yters2• 16 years ago

She explained the trap they set for Briars: "We crafted a fake satirical post lampooning Haskell as an unusable, overly complex turd -- a writing task that was emotionally difficult but conceptually trivial. Then we laced the post with deeper social subtext decrying the endemic superficiality and laziness of global industry programming culture, to make ourselves feel better. Finally, each of us upvoted the post, which was unexpectedly contentious because nobody could agree on what the [HN] voting arrows actually mean."

Apparently their approach was more successful than they thought.

JonnieCache• 16 years ago

If you don't find this funny, then you really need to examine your sense of humour, because this is not about making fun of haskell. It's barely about haskell at all. It is fantastically well constructed exercise in comic writing.

Stop thinking about the programming language wars for one minute and reread the text again, and look at the multileveled semantic games the author is playing. I thought most here were good at that?

Doug Hofstadter would be proud.

rapind2• 16 years ago

Loved the article, but someone please explain "faster than a teabagger with a grade-school arithmetic book". I'm pretty sure I got all the others.

gvb2• 16 years ago

...their Giving a Shit gene shuts down faster than a teabagger with a grade-school arithmetic book.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_movement#Use_of_term_...

The implication is that TEA party constituents have no interest in actually understanding the grade-school math necessary to understand a budget.

rapind2• 16 years ago

Thank you very much (Canuck here so I don't usually get the political references).

WildUtah• 16 years ago

There is a political movement in the USA called the Tea Party that included some demonstrations a couple years ago where they waved tea bags and called themselves teabaggers as a nickname.

Of course, teabagging has a risqué sexual connotation so the movement's opponents latched onto the nickname as the proponents dropped it.

The Tea Partiers are known for budget illiteracy, often suggesting impossible or mathematically absurd ideas to arrange government spending. At the lowest levels they suggest that cutting foreign aid and sex education will balance the federal budget. At the highest levels, they praise "courageous" budget plans like Paul Ryan's hand-waving and prayer plan to balance the budget by cutting taxes on the wealthiest and hoping that growth trickles down to all of us and health care costs magically stop rising. In between are the signs waving "keep the government's filthy hands off my medicare," the epitome of Tea Party campaigning this year.

So the story suggests that Tea Partiers have an aversion to basic arithmetic.

jacoblyles• 16 years ago

In most of California and other hip areas of the country it is considered the height of wit to refer to people who support the tea party movement by puerile grade school insults ("teabaggers" - implying that they have something to do with scrotums). It is also assumed that anyone who deviates from the prevailing left-wing fashion must be unintelligent.

It is very rare that a supporter of the tea parties actually read any of these descriptions, since fashionable leftists primarily use such insults to signal to each other how enlightened they are. Referring to supporters of the tea party as "tea baggers" gets you +1 left-wing cred points.

Unfortunately, I live in California and frequent hacker news, so I'm the rare person who is insulted on quite a regular basis by my peers who assume I will think more highly of them for peppering such insults throughout non-political conversations (Hey, a satirical article on Haskell! Oh look, another person calling me an idiot for giving a shit about the size of the federal budget and wanting to do something about it before we go bankrupt.)

edw519• 16 years ago

This was actually a personally test disguised as a blog post. See how you scored:

If you didn't understand it: You're not a hacker and never will be; go get your MBA.

If it upset you: You are a hacker without a sense of humor. You belong in a room without other people. Fed Ex will deliver your circuit boards tomorrow.

If you laughed once: You are an aspiring junior programmer. Keep on working hard and best wishes to you.

If you laughed more than once: You are a seasoned hacker. Nice to see you here.

If you sprayed Mountain Dew on your keyboard: You have that rare combination of understanding both bits and people. You must do great work.

If you are cutting and pasting these gems for your bulletin board: You and I must be kindred spirits. Email me. Let's do a start-up together.

Alternatively• 16 years ago

If you write a post attempting to categorize everyone's sociability and competence based on how close their reactions are to yours: You are edw519

tumult• 16 years ago

GHC Haskell actually supports mutually recursive generic container types, but you must enable type class system extensions which make type checking undecidable.

mkramlich• 16 years ago

my new favorite Yegge post. very funny. and so true. :)

stylejam• 16 years ago

Honestly I think this is my personal funniest post of 2010. And no, it's not making fun of Haskell.

Haskell Researchers Announce Discovery of Industry Programmer Who Gives a Shit

Related Stories