A comparison of the Haskell argmunger with its Arc equivalent (or even its Perl equivalent) should make something clear. It's been claimed that Haskell doesn't need macros, because most of the things that Lispers need macros for can be done in Haskell using lazy evaluation and so on. But the argmunger example makes it clear that there are things ( Read more... )

Why, in this day and age, does it take two working days and £27 to send a few hundred dollars from Britain to the US?

An email from the people to whom I applied:( I missed the point entirely, it seems :-( )

For reasons that are increasingly unclear to me, I've been using the TeX package XY-Pic for the commutative diagrams (of which there are many) in my thesis and papers. If there is one and only one Right Way to do something, you can pretty much guarantee that XY-Pic will:

1. do something else by default, producing horribly ugly output;
2. only do the Right ( Read more... )

In a world such as this one, filled with war, famine, impending ecological collapse and Celtic fans, it really ought to take more to horrify me than this. But I guess I'm shallow that way ( Read more... )

Implementation-defined languages come in for a lot of flak. Users of certain languages will point to their language's standards document as if it were self-evidently proof of greater inherent worth: a language that's defined by its implementation, it is implied, is always going to be a bit non-U. It may train itself out of its dropped H's and ( Read more... )

chromatic, in a conversation about domain-specific languages in Perl 6, put something I've been trying to say for a while into the correct words that would never quite come for me.
I can decipher and fix bad Ruby code, for example, because I know the underlying language.You know Ruby's syntax maybe, but who says you know the domain of the business ( Read more... )

brian d. foy says that you can't be an effective advocate for a language unless you can think of five things that you hate about it off the top of your head, the reason being that if you can't, then you don't know enough about the language to advocate it effectively. So, just to go one (or five) better, here are ( ten things I hate about Perl )

A while ago I wrote a post about what appeared to be the endemic pusillanimity of the Haskell community, tried to find more charitable explanations for my observations, and, I think, mostly succeeded. Unfortunately, the example I gave turned out not to be a good one: it turns out that it is possible to have integer-parametrized types in Haskell ( ( Read more... )

Many times in the course of my Haskell apprenticeship, I've had conversations of the following form:

Me: I want to do X in Haskell, but the obvious thing doesn't work. How do I do it?
Sensei (usually Duncan or totherme): Oh no, you can't do that! If you could do that, then you could have a transperambic Papadopolous twisted asiatic sine-curve ( Read more... )