Jxyz

Jean Yang @ CMU (together with Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @ Indiana) posted a response to this on her website: http://jxyzabc.blogspot.com/2016/05/myth-cs-researchers-dont-publish-c… Releasing code is a widespread practice in the programming languages and software engineering communities, and one that is getting stronger (see http://artifact-eval.org). If you are a CS researcher, please fill out this survey of open source and data in computer science: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1U6I3B2XAqGJDYq101e14PS78jhGl4pTHy6eDx…

The summary of that guy's Phd summary http://jxyzabc.blogspot.com/2016/02/my-phd-abridged.html {"1":"for various reasons i also spend a lot of weekends in new york and make more friends with people working on data and journalism","2":"my friend jean-baptiste who reads it asks why my blog is so good but my paper drafts are so bad","3":"at the beginning of this year i start telling people that i wish i had more female friends since i realize that there are many fewer women around me than before","4":"to keep myself from thinking about my uncertain future all the time i start a cybersecurity accelerator cybersecurity factory with my friend frank wang with the goal of helping research-minded people start companies","5":"i am too lazy to make many friends so i spend my free time reading cooking doing yoga and running"}

Have you found any drawback so far? What is your take on the "you have to write clever, complicated code to make haskell work" (1). I've read that a lot of the code use for the language shootout is far from idiomatic haskell, but just plain clever, in order to get decent performance... (1): http://jxyzabc.blogspot.ca/2009/03/haskell-vs-ocaml-or-ravings-of.html

It's an "or", not "and necessarily". People I know that prefer J (or APL) to K, tend to prefer Haskell to OCaml, _and_ / _or_ Ada to C _and_ / _or_ VHDL to Verilog. YMMV. Ocaml is more pragmatic than Haskell, in my opinion: Eagerness is more practical than laziness (if less elegant and less theoretically beautiful), refs more practical than e.g. state monads. I'm not fluent in either, so correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression is that OCaml is in most senses an impure superset of Haskell (there is always a relatively simple, though rarely trivial, translation from Haskell to OCaml, but the other way around does not exist if you use any state). http://jxyzabc.blogspot.com/2009/03/haskell-vs-ocaml-or-ravings-of.htm… echoes my impression. The discussion is, of course subjective - given a way to do IO and turing completeness, all languages are in many senses equally practical.

In CS (Systems, not Theory) research there's a big push now to move toward reproducibility by publishing code and dependencies; https://twitter.com/kragen/status/727220736633524228 talks a bit about some of the historical context and details. Hackademia has a couple of synergistic efforts going on, directed mostly at securing the free-software distribution infrastructure and somewhat at simplifying system administration: on one hand you have reproducible builds being done by Tor, Mozilla, and Debian, and on the other hand you have Nix, Guix, and the like pushing purely-functional content-addressable package management. The upshot of all of this is that, in theory, in the near future, it will be practical to publish machine-executable instructions for reproducing the bit-identical executables and other output products you used in your research, at a cost of only a few gigabytes, so they can be exactly reproduced at any time in the future, and then modified to do new experiments; and it will be straightforward to make archival copies of this entire set of dependencies so that it won't be lost because some random guy died or decided to pull his modules from npm. Mike Hoye famously complained about how far we are from this in a Tweetstorm the other day: https://twitter.com/mhoye/status/725010388547330048 The Sprite-LFS affair I mention in that tweet is an infamous case of a famous, influential systems paper by a famous, influential academic (Ousterhout) that badly failed…

>It's an "or", not "and necessarily". Yeah, but what I am saying is that you put the same people on both sides. Virtually everyone in haskell land is a C fan, it was a recent topic of discussion actually. >Ocaml is more pragmatic than Haskell, in my opinion There's a reason the haskell community is far larger than the ocaml community, and that the tools and libraries for haskell are way ahead of those for ocaml. From a purely pragmatic perspective, haskell is a far more useful language than ocaml. I say this as someone who switched from ocaml to haskell for entirely practical reasons. >Eagerness is more practical than laziness No it isn't. In 95% of cases it isn't relevant. In the other 5%, you want to use the right one. For practical purposes, it does not matter if a language is lazy by default or strict by default, as long as it is easy to do the other one. Ocaml makes it easy to do lazy, haskell makes it easy to do strict. >refs more practical than e.g. state monads Refs are not comparable to state monads. They are comparable to IORefs, or MVars, or TVars. Which are more useful than ocamls refs. A state monad is an extra thing ocaml simply lacks altogether. >so correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression is that OCaml is in most senses an impure superset of Haskell Not at all. Ocaml and haskell share a similar subset, but both have large area the other doesn't. There is very rarely a simple translation from haskell to ocaml, as ocaml is missing so many…