Grex Systems Conference

View Responses

Grex Systems Item 112: The Functional Programming item.
Entered by cross on Wed Sep 8 16:06:03 UTC 2010:

Are you programming in Standard ML, or Haskell?  How about programming 
Lisp in a functional way?  Talk about it here.

4 responses total.

#1 of 4 by sholmes on Thu Sep 9 02:10:40 2010:

I have dabbled with haskell (very very little ) and loved it. Woudl  have
loved to do haskell for profesional work but unfortnately my work involves
C/C++. I would like to pick it up again, wonder if anyone does professional
work in haskell . Would like to know what kind of realworld development work
theyare doing in haskell.

#2 of 4 by cross on Thu Sep 9 05:54:49 2010:

I think it would be great --- comedic gold --- if someone would parody 
the "Hansel" character from "Zoolander" in some sort of Haskell-
related skit.  The scene where the DJ strikes up his "Hansel" 
soundtrack when Owen Wilson is arriving at the funeral?  I could 
totally see a "Haskell" soundtrack....

But seriously.  There's quite a bit of real-world work going on in 
Haskell.  We do some at Google, but I can't talk about the project 
specifics.  Jane Street Capital (http://www.janestreet.com/) is doing 
some serious work in a couple of functional languages, including 
Haskell and OCaml (but I think primarily the latter; check out issue 7 
of The Monad.Reader for an article from them: 
http://www.haskell.org/sitewiki/images/0/03/TMR-Issue7.pdf).  The 
Haskell project wiki has a list of projects; one of the more 
interesting is Pugs, a Perl 6 interpreter written in Haskell.  Check 
out http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Applications and 
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_industry.  Facebook is 
using Haskell to make automated updates to PHP pages.

Tim Sweeney gave a fascinating talk at POPL in 2006 on "the next 
mainstream language," where he cites functional programming techniques 
as being extremely appealing for reducing defect rates and increasing 
productivity in, e.g., video game programming.  If you can view 
PowerPoint slides, check out the slides from the talk: 
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~dpw/popl/06/Tim-POPL.ppt

I think that one of the things about learning different programming 
paradigms, such as functional and logic programming, is that you can 
take some of the techniques that you learn and apply them to other 
paradigms.  If you're stuck in the C/C++ world, you can still learn 
Lisp and Haskell and try and apply some of the techniques you learn to 
your C and C++ code.  You could also try prototyping solutions in, 
e.g., Haskell and using those as tools to guide your C/C++ code.

#3 of 4 by sholmes on Thu Sep 9 06:58:25 2010:

I am aware of the many real world work done in Haskell. I just wondered if
anyone on grex did. I did apply to Janestreet capital once but they decided
not to take me.

#4 of 4 by cross on Thu Sep 9 07:43:48 2010:

Oh, my bad....

Response not possible - You must register and login before posting.