Development With Types

[totherme]

Lots of folk seem to agree that one of the nice things about having a blog is that you can use it as a public whiteboard, to help order your thoughts on any given subject. I don't post all that often myself, but this isn't because my thoughts are already ordered. It's because I've long been in the habit of using a different technology for ordering

Comments

[totherme]

Ah - sorry :)

[pozorvlak]

I tend to lj-cut things above about 500 words. Of course, that cuts down the number of people who'll actually read it substantially :-( But I don't think this article could have been cut down significantly and said all the things you needed to say.

[pozorvlak]

I've long been in the habit of using a different technology for ordering my thoughts - and when it comes to the sort of geeky code philosophy that might be most at home here, that technology is often pozorvlak.

Thank you! And no, I don't mind being described as a "recovering Perl hacker" at all. Though maybe "Perl hacker on sabbatical" might be closer - we'll see where I end up in a few years :-)

Haskell hacking methodology

[anonymous]

> Perhaps I/we should send him a copy of this, and ask how close it comes to what he does

Re: Haskell hacking methodology

[totherme]

I was rather hoping that you'd say something here :)

Thanks for the stuff on using QuickCheck and benchmarking. Is this hacking methodology written down anywhere on haskell.org? If there are other proto-pozorvlaks out there, perhaps they could be saved some pain by being turned on to typeful prototyping early?

pozorvlak: If this hacking methodology is the sort of thing that you would have liked to have read earlier, what sort of title would it have needed to let you know that it was what you wanted to read? "Haskell hacking methodology"? "Agile development with types"? "Haskell types for perl programmers"?

Re: Haskell hacking methodology

[pozorvlak]

Either of the first two - the first is more accurate, but the second is more buzzword-compliant :-)

I haven't seen anything saying this stuff explicitly on the 'net - I've had to work it out from other things I've read and conversations with you. I think it would be really useful to put it somewhere on Haskell.org - if you were trained in the type-first formal CS style of programming they teach at Oxford, it may seem as natural as breathing, but for largely self-taught programmers like me, I think it's far from obvious. And Haskell can be quite painful to use if you naively apply a hacking style learned on dynamic languages :-(