DEV Community: Anastasia Khomyakova ❤

"I think we're moving in a very positive direction"— Noon van der Silk

Anastasia Khomyakova ❤ — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 17:25:06 +0000

Hello World!

Well-known hacker is sitting in front of a quantum computer; he is just about to start programming. The terminal is open, waits for the first line of code. Which language will he uses, why, and how? And guess who this hacлук is? ;)

Welcome our lovely speaker Noon van der Silk! He will rock on the 10th of September at the Haskell Love Conference! You'd better join at 12.40 CEST!

Meanwhile, let's enjoy his interview and his incredible intro video!

Noon is a software engineer with a broad range of experience across AI, quantum computing, functional programming, and creative projects. He is passionate about learning new things, empathetic and trust-based leadership, and supporting companies to achieve their aims through thoughtful and flexible technology. In his spare time, Noon likes to explore, read, and collaborate on creative projects!

For people who work in Haskell, what Library do you desperately want someone to write?

I think one thing I find exciting about the Haskell ecosystem is that I find that people are able to think up libraries that I would never conceive of, and then demonstrate their usage so effectively that it ends up becoming something I use every day!
That said, I'd probably love some cool libraries related to profiling/debugging or otherwise understanding the runtime characteristics of Haskell programs in a really interactive and powerful way. I think there’s heaps of work to do here, in terms of technical compiler aspects but also interactive UI/debugging aspects.

What would, in your opinion, be a Haskell “killer application”?

I find the “killer application” language a bit too competitive-sounding for my taste; I believe most of us agree that things work best with lots of different people tackling problems in a variety of ways, and then coming together to improve things overall; as opposed to killing off the competition.
One thing I find that Haskell helps me do very well is plan my thoughts about what I want to build. I think I would love if this more general planning process could become more a part of the language, somehow. One way this manifests is via a richer type system; but another way could simply be through better tooling and libraries; and perhaps just wacky ideas that we haven't even seen yet.

Dmitrii Kovanikov

@chshersh

It's a really amusing intro! 🤗 I like creative content-makers in the #Haskell land 🎨 I know nothing about quantum computing but I really want to attend this @_haskellove talk only because of this video! twitter.com/_haskellove/st…

17:20 PM - 08 Sep 2021

Haskell Love Conference, online, free! @_haskellove
The classical action movie. @noon_silk has less than a minute to hack the system (and probably save the world!). Is he going to succeed? Will the quantum computer let him give his talk at #HaskellLove on Friday? No spoilers! https://t.co/FBvZG5InRC

What would be your favourite piece of Haskell-branded clothing?

Well, biasedly, I've actually already made my own Haskell-branded clothing! So that's probably my favourite. Outside of that, I'd certainly wear a matching Haskell tracksuit combination.

State of Haskell Survey results in 2020 shows that the number of developers who use Hackage vs. Stackage is almost the same. Which one do you use, why?

Both! I love Stack; I use it for all my personal projects.

96% of respondents of the State of Haskell Survey said they code as a hobby, do you? Is that for an open source project?

Yes definitely. It’s how I got into Haskell in the first place; through making some really nice friends and connections with my local Haskell meetup group!

If you wanted to convince someone to use Haskell, what would you say?

Probably I would repeat my “tool for thought” idea above; namely that it’s an interesting way to force yourself to think about what you want to write.

If you could change one thing about Haskell, what would it be?

Overall I think I love how Haskell has developed over the years and I have no big concerns. I might echo Dmitrii’s thoughts and hope that as a community we can move towards making all kinds of people feel welcome, and not valorise certain kinds of technical knowledge but also communitarian knowledge! I think we're moving in a very positive direction with the establishment of the Haskell Foundation, on this front.

Noon and many other fabulous speakers will be performing for you on the 10th of September, moreover you will have a great chance to discuss all your questions during the "live" Q&A in SpatilChat!
Move your bubble closer ;)

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"Generally I think that all commonly needed libraries already exist and are quite good"— Ivan Gromakovskii

Anastasia Khomyakova ❤ — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 12:56:36 +0000

Hello wonderful all!

Let us introduce to you our next incredible speaker Ivan Gromakovskii, he is a Haskell software developer and team lead at Serokell with 6 years of experience in Haskell.

For people who work in Haskell, what Library do you desperately want someone to write?

Generally I think that all commonly needed (for a wide range of problems) libraries already exist and are quite good. When I need something that I can't find in existing libraries, usually it's either something too specific to my problem (e. g. a library to interact with some specific service) or some functionality missing in an existing library. At the same time we can't say that Haskell is the best language choice to write all software one could possibly imagine. It's really good for certain problems (many of them), but it doesn't need to be a language for everything and it's completely ok that for different problems different languages are more suitable. For example, if you need to do scientific computing (interpolation, optimization, matrices), you will likely choose Python which has NumPy and SciPy which are really nice and used by a lot of people. I think Haskell could also be a good choice for scientific computing, the language itself provides a good basis, but there are no libraries as cool and popular as NumPy. So I want someone to write a library that would make Haskell as great for scientific computing as Python is nowadays.

What would be your favourite piece of Haskell-branded clothing?

Funny that you ask, Serokell is actually working on a line of clothing with several very cool FP-themed prints. It will be quite hard to beat those for me.

What I Wish I’d Known When Learning Haskell?

For example, I wish I'd known about the async package, it would help me properly manage threads in my applications.

Once we were over the infamous Haskell learning curve, we began looking for functional programming, immutability, and types everywhere! Given that most modern applications are web apps, it is only a matter of time before we make the switch to typed-FP for front-end development. Would you write the front end in Haskell?

I am generally not a fan of frontend/UI development, I prefer to develop backend servers, command line tools, libraries, etc. That said, I've been working on full-stack applications (frontend+backend) lately and our default preference for frontend is TypeScript and React. We were considering Haskell (e. g. Miso, Obelisk) for frontend development in the last project, but we decided to minimize the risks and use a more battle-tested approach (i. e. TypeScript and React). If Haskell becomes more suitable, mature and popular for production frontend development, I'll be happy to work on a project where Haskell is used on frontend.

State of Haskell Survey results in 2020 shows that the number of developers who use Hackage vs. Stackage is almost the same. Which one do you use, why?

If we talk about the websites, I prefer Hackage because it loads faster. But I use Stackage snapshots and include stack.yaml in all projects, so I use Stackage website as well to see what versions are included in what snapshots. If we talk about tools, I prefer cabal to stack and use cabal.project.freeze files generated from stack.yaml.

96% of respondents of the State of Haskell Survey said they code as a hobby, do you? Is that for an open source project?

I don't code as a hobby, at least regularly. I think there is enough programming in my life as part of my job. Also I usually like what I do at my job and since I have free working schedule I can code (not as a hobby) at any time. I may rarely code something for myself just because I want.

If you wanted to convince someone to use Haskell, what would you say?
When I was new to Haskell one of the first things I noticed and liked was its clarity, meaning that Haskell code is usually short but at the same time not hard to understand. Many things that seem complex in other languages are just 1 or 2 lines of code in Haskell. In other languages there are many "programming patterns", but in Haskell they mostly boil down to function application. Another selling point is Haskell type system that allows to catch a lot of bugs in compile-time. However, this point may be dangerous since it decreases motivation to write tests and even run your programs to check their correctness. The first point is dangerous as well beacuse it makes Haskell programmers lazy, but it doesn't matter if I just want to convince someone to use it.

If you could change one thing about Haskell, what would it be?

There are several things and of course it's hard to choose only one. But for example I would really love to decrease redundancy in the world of Haskell libraries. If you develop a medium-sized application, you may quickly get 200-300 or even more transitive dependencies. The sad story is that some of them use different approaches for the same problems. For example, some libraries may use a custom prelude and we have a plenty of them. There are 3 type classes that allow us to use catch function in a monad other than IO: MonadCatch, MonadBaseControl and MonadUnliftIO. All 3 are defined in different packages that don't depend on each other, so ideally you would use only one of them, but in your application you'll most likely end up depending on all 3 for historical reasons. Another example is lens and microlens, you are very likely to depend on both. There is redundancy in less popular libraries as well, for example pretty-terminal and colourista are very similar. Just to be clear: I don't mean to blame people who develop all these libraries and it's good that we have a choice. I am talking about the perfect world where each problem has a single globally accepted solution that everyone likes. Such an issue exists for historical reasons: there is X that everyone uses, but not everyone likes, then someone creates Y as an alternative to X and we have both X and Y in use.

Ivan will be performing on the 10th of September at 11.45 CEST about Exceptions and concurrency! You should definitely join Ivan and don't forget about Q&A in SpatialChat.

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"It's the most beautiful and elegant language I'm aware of."— Anton Kholomiov

Anastasia Khomyakova ❤ — Thu, 02 Sep 2021 19:47:06 +0000

Hello wonderful people!

You're asking: - Who can attend?
We'rу answering: - Everyone is welcome!

Even if you have a monad-o-phobia, please join us, we want Haskell Love Conference to be accessible to everyone, no matter FP experience level. What’s more? We don’t mind if you bring your cat as a plus-one!

Meanwhile, here is the interview of our next speaker - Anton Kholomiov. Anton is an avid haskeller and musician. He has built many libraries on Hackage. Most notable are csound-expression, data-fix, language-css, temporal-media, temporal-music, processing-for-Haskell, data-fix-cse. Anton is happy to make clean and concise EDSLs for all sorts of problems. In his spare time projects, he tends to gravitate toward arts media applications (music, graphics) and compilers. Right now he is involved with cryptocurrencies and Cardano project and builds applications on top of Plutus framework.

For people who work in Haskell, what Library do you desperately want someone to write?

Easy to use GUI library or framework for mobiles (obelisk seems to be the case for it).Nowadays clients expect to have mobile apps for every useful app. It would be nice to expand on that market.

If you had to pick one thing to include in the next Haskell Report, what would it be?

I'd like to have a section on success stories from the industry or academia/research teams all over the world, or if not successful to have war stories on cool projects. So that every Haskeller can list through that section and be able to find the teams where (s)he can apply to use Haskell.

What would, in your opinion, be a Haskell “killer application”?

GHC is the most powerful Haskell app we have. Tool to explore space leaks, debugger for Haskell.

Haskell Love Conference, online, free!

@_haskellove

#OSS developer, #Haskell & #Plutus consultant @ mlabs.city. When Anton Kholomiov is not focusing on blockchain, he likes to tune up w/Haskell and Csound. Those who cannot wait to see Anton's talk @ #HaskellLove -hop on youtube and give a like! loom.ly/aa-zFV8

05:49 AM - 01 Sep 2021

What would be your favourite piece of Haskell-branded clothing?

T-shirts that always stay pure.

What I Wish I’d Known When Learning Haskell?

How addictive it is.

I did it with Reflex. It was hard but fun thing to do. I think if I need to do web app again I would use Haskell for that or try purescript which is close to it.

State of Haskell Survey results in 2020 shows that the number of developers who use Hackage vs. Stackage is almost the same. Which one do you use, why?

I use both. It's on demand of the project/team. For my pet project I usually use Stack with Stackage becasue it is quick to setup (or maybe I'm used o it). Recently I've started to use more nix as niv saves lots of trouble to setup the Nix-project from scratch.

96% of respondents of the State of Haskell Survey said they code as a hobby, do you? Is that for an open source project?

I use Haskell on my day job.

If you wanted to convince someone to use Haskell, what would you say?

It's hard question. It's the most beautiful and elegant language I'm aware of.

If you could change one thing about Haskell, what would it be?

Reduce compilation time make infrastructure for building projects more lightweight and easy to use.

If you want to attend Anton's session, you still have an opportunity to register for FREE! He will be presentig on 10th of September at 17.15 CEST at Joy Track+ Q&A in SpatialChat!

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"JUST PICK A LIBRARY AND WRITE SOMETHING." — Joseph Morag

Anastasia Khomyakova ❤ — Thu, 02 Sep 2021 19:46:51 +0000

Hello wonderful people!

Similar to our previous events, a key objective remains to be facilitating interactive connections between attendees and speakers.
Consequently, every session will be streaming LIVE with a dedicated Discord channel supporting live Q&A—because everyone benefits from improved learning through questioning and connecting. Each talk will be followed by live Q&A in SpatialChat, you'll get a real chance to spend quality time with the speakers and follow up on what you learn from their talks.

Our next speaker is Joseph Morag, a professional developer, violinist, and conductor, who found Haskell after a semester of college spent chasing down C memory errors. As a young musician, Joseph dreamed of being the first person to give a concert on the moon. However, after finishing a Bachelor's in physics at Columbia and learning that it's rather hard to hear music in space, he moved to computer science with the hope that it would allow him to better use his technical skills to tackle musical problems. OpenStrings represents the combination of Joseph's passions for music and Haskell and is the result of his Master's thesis at New York University. Currently, Joseph is a partner at Lantern, working on providing unrestricted internet access to all reaches of the globe.

For people who work in Haskell, what Library do you desperately
want someone to write?

Not so much a library, but I'd like there to exist a Haskell version of Python's numpy and associated packages for numerical programming and data science. Right now, we have some isolated pieces like hmatrix and Chart, and many small individual libraries listed on http://www.datahaskell.org/docs/community/current-environment.html, but we are missing the polish and comprehensiveness of the Python
ecosystem.

If you had to pick one thing to include in the next Haskell Report, what would it be?

GHC has diverged considerably from the 2010 report. In order for the next report to be compatible with the majority of code on Hackage, all of the extensions under GHC2021 would have to be included.

What would, in your opinion, be a Haskell “killer application”?

Haskell's "killer application" is in writing other languages. It is a phenomenal tool for implementing a compiler or interpreter.

What would be your favourite piece of Haskell-branded clothing?

Something lazy. Maybe pajamas.

What I Wish I’d Known When Learning Haskell?

JUST PICK A LIBRARY AND WRITE SOMETHING. Decision fatigue is a huge time drain, especially in the Haskell ecosystem where for certain problem domains, we have many excellent overlapping options. Instead of trying to decide which is best, I've found that it's always more productive to just pick one and start writing code. The ease of refactoring in Haskell means that initial design choices are much less binding than they can be
when writing in other languages, so swapping out a library halfway
through writing an app is relatively inexpensive.

Once we were over the infamous Haskell learning curve, we began
looking for functional programming, immutability, and types
everywhere! Given that most modern applications are web apps, it is only a matter of time before we make the switch to typed-FP for
front-end development. Would you write the front end in Haskell?

Once GHCJS and/or Asterius are upstreamed into GHC proper as JS and WebAssembly backends, absolutely. Right now, however, the initial time investment to set up tooling for those compilers has kept me from trying them out.

State of Haskell Survey results in 2020 shows that the number of
developers who use Hackage vs. Stackage is almost the same. Which one do you use, why?

I try and have my projects build with both stack and cabal, when
feasible. Though I haven't measured it, around when the cabal v2
commands came out, building with cabal felt snappier to me,whereas there are some workflows where using stack is more convenient.

96% of respondents of the State of Haskell Survey said they code as a hobby, do you? Is that for an open source project?

A lot of my "hobby" code involves writing small toy projects, like a dns server https://github.com/jmorag/sirdns or some game utilities (https://github.com/jmorag/hbomb-repl, https://github.com/laurenarnett/euchre-server>). My large-ish project is OpenStrings, the subject of my upcoming Haskell Love talk. The rest of my free coding time goes to maintaining my emacs configuration and packages.

If you wanted to convince someone to use Haskell, what would you say?

Haskell is a beautiful language with unrivalled abstraction
capabilities. Once you learn to express yourself in it, you'll never be happy writing anything else again.

If you could change one thing about Haskell, what would it be?

My impression is that the reason Haskell isn't more popular can't be attributed to one large problem, but rather a series of small paper cuts. The String type, record issues, and build tool fragmentation all make the barrier to entry higher than it needs to be for an already difficult to learn language. If I could change one thing, I'd go back in time to fix those paper cuts before they became entrenched in all of our base libraries and gave Haskell the stigma of being an impractical language for industry.

Joseph will be talking about Open Strings on the 10th of September at 19.05 CEST, Joy track.

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"In Kowainik, we had to learn many things the hard way." — Dmitrii Kovanikov

Anastasia Khomyakova ❤ — Thu, 02 Sep 2021 19:46:30 +0000

Hello Haskell Lovers!

We’re bringing together the best collection of speakers from top technology companies. Some you may know (and probably already follow on Twitter). Others you'll be discovering for the first time here.
Our experts will share tactics and best practices on how to build the next generation of software products using Haskell and Functional programming.

We are thrilled to present you the interview of our next speaker - Dmitrii Kovanikov.

Functional Programming is one of Dmitrii's passions, and it has been a part of his professional life for quite a while already. He co-created Kowainik — an open-source organization where he maintains OSS libraries, write tutorials and mentor people. Dmitrii is an author and maintainer of dozens OSS libraries and applications. He also had been teaching Haskell at ITMO University for several years to undergrad students. Dmitrii loves making complicated topics accessible and sharing his knowledge with others!

For people who work in Haskell, what Library do you desperately want someone to write?

I desperately want to have an OTP-like Erlang-style framework for applications with multiple concurrent worker threads.
I would like to start asynchronous tasks to handle their errors easily, restart them, clean up resources and monitor their states.
Haskell already has several libraries in this area, but they are either not maintained or too low-level.

If you had to pick one thing to include in the next Haskell Report, what would it be?

I'm not worried about the technical content of the report; I believe it definitely will be wholesome. But I'd love to see people collaborating on the goal of delivering the next report and helping each other sincerely instead of bikeshedding unnecessary details or arguing about what to include.

What would, in your opinion, be a Haskell “killer application”?

DSL for implementing highly efficient and concurrent custom build tools.

What would be your favourite piece of Haskell-branded clothing?

Scarf. I would love to wear it during a freezing and snowy winter ❄️ Compiling Haskell programs usually heats my laptop a lot, so I imagine a Haskell-branded scarf to be warm as well.

What I Wish I’d Known When Learning Haskell?

Best-practices and recommendations on maintaining your own packages 📦
In Kowainik, we had to learn many things the hard way.

Just a thought of using JavaScript for writing frontend terrifies to the bones ☠️ I used Elm and PureScript in the past, and it was a joy!
However, there's an immense benefit in using the same language for both backend and frontend. So I'm definitely looking forward to the success of the asterius project!

State of Haskell Survey results in 2020 shows that the number of developers who use Hackage vs. Stackage is almost the same. Which one do you use, why?

I'm using cabal-install and Hackage for my projects. This workflow allows me to upgrade major versions of different libraries more granularly but at the same time, get the latest bug fixes and performance improvements automatically.

96% of respondents of the State of Haskell Survey said they code as a hobby, do you? Is that for an open source project?

I'm using Haskell professionally for 5+ years. Before that, I was teaching Haskell at ITMO University to undergrad students.
At the same time, Haskell had been my hobby during these years.
In Kowainik, we created a lot of Haskell open-source projects: 60+ Haskell-related repositories on GitHub and ~40 maintained packages on Hackage.

If you wanted to convince someone to use Haskell, what would you say?

Composable and elegant concurrency, superb maintainability, sanity-preserving refactoring

If you could change one thing about Haskell, what would it be?

I would make the Haskell community more welcoming to new ideas and less discouraging to people doing things differently.

In his talk, Dmitrii is going to present an abstraction for bidirectional conversion in Haskell, how to implement it, how it helps to avoid common errors, and how you can translate it to other languages.
10th of September at 09.55 CEST, Happiness track.

Join us!

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"I’m lucky enough to have a job that is basically a hobby"— Jeremy Gibbons

Anastasia Khomyakova ❤ — Thu, 02 Sep 2021 19:46:11 +0000

Hello wonderful Haskell World!

On the 10th of September, we are running the online Haskell Love Conference.

For the second time, the Haskell Love conference gathers all Haskell enthusiasts from around the globe!

It is about the Haskell language, of course. Haskell Love Conference is the biggest λ online event in the world. Attendees get the best content and the opportunity to meet the functional community a little bit closer, completely for free!

This event is focused on the FP community, knowledge exchange, and having fun!

It's amazing that Jeremy Gibbons is our lovely speaker second year in a row! We really appreciate it!

Jeremy Gibbons

@jer_gib

Looking forward to it! Don't need to break in any more... twitter.com/_haskellove/st…

09:33 AM - 29 Aug 2021

Haskell Love Conference, online, free! @_haskellove
We've been so lucky to have @jer_gib @ #haskelllove 2020. For those who don't remember - Jeremy broke into University Department to have his talk then.What '21 'll bring?Who can tell,but you should definitely join the talk by one of our favorite speakers!Thx Jeremy for being w/us https://t.co/lqUFS3pv5d

Jeremy Gibbons is a Professor of Computing at the University of Oxford, where he teaches on the part-time professional Master’s program in Software Engineering and leads the Algebra of Programming research group. He is co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Functional Programming.

Jeremy is former Chair of IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi (which designed Algol68), and former Vice-Chair of ACM SIGPLAN (which runs ICFP). His recent book “Algorithm Design with Haskell” with Richard Bird was published last year by Cambridge University Press.

You can enjoy his interview for this year edition as well as can enjoy his last year talk!

For people who work in Haskell, what Library do you desperately want someone to write?

A SimplePrelude (and make it opt out rather than opt in).

If you had to pick one thing to include in the next Haskell Report, what would it be?

Simple Prelude.

What would, in your opinion, be a Haskell “killer application”?

I say it’s “little languages”: DSLs, deep and shallow embeddings, transformations and optimizations of ASTs, and so on.

What would be your favourite piece of Haskell-branded clothing?
Facemask. :-)

What I Wish I’d Known When Learning Haskell?

What monads were. (This was 30 years ago.)

Absolutely.

State of Haskell Survey results in 2020 shows that the number of developers who use Hackage vs. Stackage is almost the same. Which one do you use, why?

Preferably, neither! I tend not to write code that uses anything beyond the standard libraries.

96% of respondents of the State of Haskell Survey said they code as a hobby, do you? Is that for an open source project?

I’m lucky enough to have a job that is basically a hobby: even if I didn’t need to work to earn a living, I would still continue writing pretty programs and then writing papers about them.

If you wanted to convince someone to use Haskell, what would you say?

Try it - it’s fun!

If you could change one thing about Haskell, what would it be?

To get back to simplicity, at least by default. I understand how recent changes to the libraries mean that minimum (3,4) = 4. But that craziness should only be revealed to expert users, after turning on a ComplicatedLibraries pragma. Out of the box, Haskell should not burn beginners; without the magic pragma, that expression should be a type error.

If you want to learn more and discuss your questions, please join Jeremy's presentation Continuation-passing style, defunctionalization, and associativity on the 10th of September at 17.15 CEST, Joy Track+ Q&A in SpatialChat !

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"I code as a hobby!" — Ryan Orendorff

Anastasia Khomyakova ❤ — Thu, 02 Sep 2021 19:45:51 +0000

Hello wonderful friends!

If you're ready to take your Haskell skills to the next level and you still haven't made plans, register now to join us on September 10th. Registration is FREE!

Our next speaker is Ryan Orendorff, he is the Research Scientist at Facebook Reality Labs Research, working on novel human computer interaction research.

For people who work in Haskell, what Library do you desperately want someone to write?

I don't professionally work in Haskell, but I would love to!

If you had to pick one thing to include in the next Haskell Report, what would it be?

That's a tough one. I'd like to see dependent Haskell take on a more prominent role without the special constructs currently required. I program more in Agda than in Haskell as a hobby than Haskell, and I found the clarity Agda has around dependent types really demystified some components of Haskell for me.

What would, in your opinion, be a Haskell “killer application”?

I think Haskell could find a killer application in the medical field, both in control systems for hardware devices such as MRIs and in backend data processing code. The code for medical devices and associated systems can be deployed for long periods of time without updates; in such a case, a language like Haskell could reduce the number of bugs and logic errors that may otherwise go uncorrected for a significant period of time. This code can also have a significant impact on patient outcomes, and so it is vitally important that we get the code right!

What would be your favourite piece of Haskell-branded clothing?

Currently my favorite piece of Haskell clothing is the "Enemy of the Mutable State" work by Mark Lentczer. If I had to make a new piece of clothing, I'd have to say some purple hiking shorts with the Haskell lambda would be great so that the wildlife knew how much I loved Haskell.

What I Wish I’d Known When Learning Haskell?

When I was learning Haskell, I was (and still sometimes am) confused by the array of tools at my disposal. There is so much to learn, and I felt like Haskell didn't "click" properly until a few pieces came together all at once. What I wish I known when I started Haskell was that you can be very productive with the basic tools and common packages that don't use too many advanced Haskell features. All the great resources and blogs on advanced Haskell were so tempting when I started learning, but I should have bookmarked those resources and came back to them when I was ready instead of diving into the deep end early.

State of Haskell Survey results in 2020 shows that the number of developers who use Hackage vs. Stackage is almost the same. Which one do you use, why?

I use Nix, so transitively I suppose I use Hackage. I recommend giving Nix a shot---it is a great way to make a reproducible environment that anyone can use for any language.

96% of respondents of the State of Haskell Survey said they code as a hobby, do you? Is that for an open source project?

Yes, I code as a hobby! I have an open source package called "Functional Linear Algebra" for Agda where I am playing around with what linear algebra I can prove in Agda. Otherwise I contribute to the Nix repository on occasion.

If you could change one thing about Haskell, what would it be?

I'd love an amazing plotting library with similar power to that of matplotlib in Python or the plotting tools in Matlab. Since plotting results is a large part of my past jobs, having a good plotting library can make a huge difference in how long it takes me to complete a project!

When\Where: 10th of September at 18.10 CEST, Happiness Track+ Q&A in SpatialChat

What: Functional Programming + Dependent Types ≡ Verified Linear Algebra

What about: Linear algebra is the backbone of many critical algorithms such as self driving cars and machine learning. Modern tooling makes it easy to program with linear algebra, but the resulting code is prone to bugs from index mismatches and improperly defined matrices.

In this talk, we will formalize basic linear algebra operations by representing a matrix as a function from one vector space to another. This "matrix-free" construction will enable us to prove basic properties about linear algebra; from this base, we will show a framework for formulating optimization problems that is correct by construction, meaning that it will be impossible to represent improperly formed matrices. We will compare the Agda framework to similar frameworks written in Python and in dependently typed Haskell, and demonstrate proving properties about neural networks using this framework.

Hop on!

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"I really don't have any regrets." — Brent Yorgey

Anastasia Khomyakova ❤ — Thu, 02 Sep 2021 19:45:28 +0000

Hello wonderful Haskell Lovers!

Haskell Love are ready to rock! Our engines are starting! Last year there were 1800 of you. We need your help to pump it up till 2000 this year! Let's show this world how powerful the #Haskell community is!!!

And please welcome our next speaker - Brent Yorgey, well-known in the Haskell community as the author of the Typeclassopedia and the primary author of the diagrams vector graphics framework. Over the past five years, he has solved over 1500 competitive programming problems on Open Kattis, almost 1000 of them in Haskell. He currently teaches CS & math at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, USA. When he's not teaching, hacking, or helping take care of three kids, he also enjoys playing the piano, learning Spanish, and reading anything written by N. K. Jemisin.

For people who work in Haskell, what Library do you desperately want someone to write?

For a current fun side project I really wish there was a nice library for coherent noise and procedural generation. I will probably just end up writing it myself.

If you had to pick one thing to include in the next Haskell Report, what would it be?

To be honest, I really don't care!

What would, in your opinion, be a Haskell “killer application”?

Haskell's strong type system, along with tools such as LiquidHaskell, make it possible to formally verify program properties at compile time. This makes it much less likely that a Haskell application would actually kill someone.

What would be your favourite piece of Haskell-branded clothing?

It's not strictly Haskell-branded, but I do love my Lambdaman shirt.

What I Wish I’d Known When Learning Haskell?

I really don't have any regrets. In most cases, when people look back and wish they had known X when they were learning Y, they are misunderstanding their own learning process; knowing X earlier would not have helped. And I'm still learning Haskell, so it's not too late!

No, because I would not write it in any language. I hate web development. But if someone else is writing it, then of course, they ought to use Haskell for that.

State of Haskell Survey results in 2020 shows that the number of developers who use Hackage vs. Stackage is almost the same. Which one do you use, why?

I don't really understand this question, because they are not mutually exclusive; Stackage is built on top of Hackage. I use both, of course. I tend to use in situations where I care about build reproducibility, and for everything else.

96% of respondents of the State of Haskell Survey said they code as a hobby, do you? Is that for an open source project?

Absolutely. I have been writing open-source Haskell code as a hobby for almost 15 years.

If you wanted to convince someone to use Haskell, what would you say?

Convincing people by talking at them rarely works. Instead, I would just show off some cool things I've done with Haskell, and give them some of my course notes to read.

If you could change one thing about Haskell, what would it be?

I'd love to see a better-decomposed class.

Join Brent on the 10th of September at 16.20 CEST at Joy Track, he will be speaking about Competitive Programming in Haskell.

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"The Haskell ecosystem has really mature"— Thomas Tuegel

Anastasia Khomyakova ❤ — Thu, 02 Sep 2021 19:45:08 +0000

Hello Haskell Lovers!

Haskell Love is around the corner and we are happy to present you the interview of out next speaker - Thomas Tuegel.

Thomas Tuegel is a physicist-turned-software-engineer who has been passionately using Haskell for 13 years. He has worked on Haskell projects in a variety of domains, from build systems (Cabal) to numerical simulations to theorem provers.

For people who work in Haskell, what Library do you desperately want someone to write?

The Haskell ecosystem has really matured since I began using Haskell. When I started, it was still a challenge to find all of the high-quality general purpose libraries you would need. If you needed libraries for a specific domain on top of that, you usually needed to write your own. If anything domain-specific existed, it probably wasn't very mature. Now, we have really high-quality general purpose libraries. We also now have deep coverage
(high-quality libraries) in many domains, but I think we still lack the breadth of domain coverage that you would see in a more mainstream ecosystem. In broad terms, that's what I miss with Haskell.

If you had to pick one thing to include in the next Haskell Report, what would it be?

This is a difficult question to answer: it has been so long since the last updated report that almost any update would be welcome, but it has been so long that a considerable backlog of worthy candidates has accumulated. If I could pick only one addition, it would be MultiParamTypeClasses. This extension is so ubiquitous, and so obvious, that I can scarcely imagine writing Haskell without it. Honorable mentions go to FlexibleContexts, TypeFamilies, and TypeApplications.

What would, in your opinion, be a Haskell “killer application”?

To me, a killer application is something that would make Haskell indispensible. For example, machine learning is a killer application for Python. This is tough to spot because it's usually something new; you can't very well move into an existing space and take it over as your "killer application". So, you have to look at where people are doing cutting edge work using Haskell that isn't about Haskell itself.
I think language implementation is already nearly a killer application for Haskell. It's not a new space, but it's one that Haskell has occupied for a long time. I think what would propel Haskell over the top here is something like a middleware for languages: you provide the syntax and some semantic rules and the
middleware provides a parser, interpreter, compiler, and so forth. Graal tries to provide this for the JVM, but I think Haskell provides the pieces you need to build something much more flexible.

What would be your favourite piece of Haskell-branded clothing?

Strangely, I don't actually own any Haskell-branded clothing. But
hypothetically, a Haskell sweater would be very on-brand for me.

What I Wish I’d Known When Learning Haskell?

I ignored monoids for too long when I was learning Haskell, but now I see them everywhere.

I would probably not start a typical web app frontend in Haskell today. This largely reflects my own aversion to technical risk: I am not aware of a production-ready Haskell to JavaScript compiler. I would not want to track performance across multiple browsers on multiple desktop and mobile platforms. I would want to take advantage of the enormous JavaScript ecosystem (not only libraries, but documentation!). These issues are not fatal to a Haskell frontend effort, but each represents a risk. Haskell on the backend is pretty boring, from a technical standpoint; Haskell on the frontend is too exciting for me.

State of Haskell Survey results in 2020 shows that the number of developers who use Hackage vs. Stackage is almost the same. Which one do you use, why?

I have used both Hackage and Stackage professionally. For my personal projects,I mainly use Hackage because I want to keep them continuously up-to-date.

96% of respondents of the State of Haskell Survey said they code as a hobby,do you? Is that for an open source project?

I do write code as a hobby, though much less than I used to. I maintain a few libraries and tools to suit my own needs. Outside of Haskell, I also work on Nixpkgs.

If you wanted to convince someone to use Haskell, what would you say?

Haskell reduces uncertainty in the software development process. I think there is a "happy path" to writing reliable, maintainable software in any language.
Risk enters because we stray from that path, unintentionally. Haskell gives us feedback to find the path, and tools to get back to it. Haskell has many features that set it apart from other languages, but giving the developer feedback might be Haskell's most unusual feature. It's certainly among the most useful.

If you could change one thing about Haskell, what would it be?

If I could change one thing about Haskell, I would replace Haskell's module system with the proposed LocalModules extension. Teams using Haskell really lack good tools for managing names. It's not so important when a project is small, but this type of organization is really critical once you have more code than you can comfortably read in an afternoon.

He will be performing on the 10th of September at 15.25 CEST at Happiness Track, and don't forget to join Thomas at his Q&A at SpatialChat

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"When it comes time to choose, my familiarity with Spring outweighs the innovations of Quarkus", —Tom Cools

Anastasia Khomyakova ❤ — Wed, 23 Jun 2021 01:20:18 +0000

Hello folks!

If you want to dive into Advanced Testing Patterns, you should definitely attend Tom's Cools presentation on the 26th of June at 16.45 CEST!! Meanwhile, let's enjoy his cool interview!

Tom called himself a geek in all facets of the word, including but not limited to board games, comic books, and programming. Developer without borders, both geographically and technically. Active as a consultant, usually for some of the biggest financial institutions in both Belgium and The Netherlands. Next to that, I am trainer/teacher who loves to share not only knowledge but also a passion for our craft.

What new countries have you “visited” thanks to the online format?

I've given some only talks for meetups and conferences in Portugal, Germany, UK and Netherlands.
It's been fun but it would have been nice to travel there of course ;).

If there are Java Champions, perhaps we should add Java Princesses and Java Dragons, too?

Nah, Java Champions in itself is enough. I'd leave the princesses and dragons for the Super Mario Bros.

How has your programming style with Java evolved over the past couple of years? What are some of the things that led to the significant improvements?

I got better at using shortcuts in my IDE, so I refactor way faster than before.
Java Streams are also pretty amazing in dealing with collections.

Do you have any personal habits around development or self-care that you would like to share with our audience?

I was lucky to transform my coding hobby into my job, but for self-care reasons, that also means I needed to find another hobby.
Can't always be coding. :)

There are Groovy, Scala, Kotlin, and many others in the family of JVM languages. What features do we miss in Java in comparison with other JVM languages? Elaborate.

Some of the features of those languages are slowly finding their way in Java (see Records).
I've been coding some Kotlin lately and I must say I prefer their way of handling nullability. Optional<> in Java helped, but it's pretty verbose.

There are plenty of reasons why Java, being one of the older software programming languages, is still widely used. For one, the immense power one wields when using Java is enough to make it their staple—coupled with the possibility of using good Java frameworks that can reduce the turnaround time for big projects. Your favorite framework? What advantages and disadvantages it has?

Despite the season triggers all my allergies, Spring is my favorite framework.
Spring has been around for a long time and with the advent of Spring Boot it cemented itself as my de-facto choice.
It just offers so much convenience when building software and integrating it with other tools like Kafka, RabbitMQ and databases.
I am keeping a close eye on Quarkus and have been impressed by it's evolution so far. When it comes time to choose, my familiarity with Spring outweighs the innovations of Quarkus.

Tom Cools

@tcoolsit

Alright #java Lovers! Hope to 'see' you there this weekend! 😍 twitter.com/jloveconf/stat…

13:44 PM - 21 Jun 2021

jLove - JVM festival, free, June 25th - 26th @jloveconf
Sleepless in production? Join the session by @TCoolsIT at #jlove to improve your tests for stressless deploying your application https://t.co/2EJqpMAQxA

In the beginning, Make was the only build automation tool available beyond homegrown solutions. Make has been around since 1976, and as such, it was used for building Java applications in the early Java years.
However, many conventions from C programs didn't fit in the Java ecosystem, so in time Ant took over as a better alternative. Maven continues to use XML files just like Ant but in a much more manageable way. And then, Gradle was built upon the concepts of Ant and Maven.
Fancy Gradle or old school Maven? Or Ant?!

I fancy Maven because it feels more structured to me than Gradle. Gradle is very flexible in how you configure it but that is its biggest downside for me.
Could be this is just my familiarity-bias talking again... but I'd choose Maven any day.

Are we going to use modules ever? When we create a module, we organize the code internally in packages, just like we previously did with any other project. So why are packages not enough?

I've been seeing a lot of debate on this. My take on it is: "If you see value in it, use it. If not, then don't." Maybe packages are enough for your usecase.
That being said, JPMS enables some pretty nice features like building your own "mini Java" which only includes the modules you need.

Gunnar Morling & Hans-Peter Grahsl at jLove'21

Anastasia Khomyakova ❤ — Wed, 23 Jun 2021 01:19:51 +0000

Hello friends! jLove is ready to rock!

We had a lovely conversation with our speakers Gunnar Morling & Hans-Peter Grahsl and we want to invite you to join their presentation Change Data Streaming Patterns in Distributed Systems on the 25th of June at 13.30 CEST!
You will explore how to:

Employ the outbox pattern for reliable, eventually consistent data exchange between microservices, without incurring unsafe dual writes or tight coupling
Gradually extract microservices from existing monolithic applications, using CDC and the strangler fig pattern
Coordinate long-running business transactions across multiple services using CDC-based saga orchestration, ensuring such activity gets consistently applied or aborted by all participating services

Gunnar is a software engineer and open-source enthusiast by heart. He is leading the Debezium project, a tool for change data capture (CDC). He is a Java Champion, the spec lead for Bean Validation 2.0 (JSR 380), and has founded multiple open source projects such as Deptective and MapStruct. Prior to joining Red Hat, Gunnar worked on a wide range of Java EE projects in the logistics and retail industries. He's based in Hamburg, Germany.

Hans-Peter is a technical trainer at NETCONOMY. As an independent engineer and consultant, he helps customers to build cloud-based or on-premises data architectures using modern technology stacks and NoSQL data stores. He is also an associate lecturer for Software Engineering at CAMPUS 02 and is speaking at tech-related and developer conferences. For his code contributions, conference talks, and blog post writing at the intersection of the Apache Kafka and MongoDB ecosystems, Hans-Peter received the Confluent Community Catalyst award twice and became one of the founding members of the MongoDB Champions Program

What new countries have you “visited” thanks to the online format?

Hans-Peter: I would have to double-check... but from the top of my head I think the one new country I had the chance to at least virtually visit was Brasil - and it was really great. I was
fortunate enough to be among this year's speakers at The Developers Conference 2021 Connections earlier this June.

If there are Java Champions, perhaps we should add Java Princesses and Java Dragons,too?

Gunnar: Oh, yes I’d love to see a whole family of Java-tastic people. The more people that share the love and knowledge of Java, the better!

How has your programming style with Java evolved over the past couple of years? What aresome of the things that led to the significant improvements?

Hans-Peter: What I realized by looking at my own code over time is, that it has become slightly more functional since Java 8+. Other than that, I try to make use of modern language constructs beyond JDK11 in case projects are running on newer versions. However, I think in shared code bases it's important not to excessively apply all new language constructs/features just because they are available to use.

Do you have any personal habits around development or self-care that you would like to share with our audience?

Hans-Peter: It's really important to me that I can take regular breaks from challenging technical tasks, no matter if its about coding, design, review or other technical matters. What works best for me to "free my mind" is doing any kind of sports activity or just hanging around with the kids for a while.

Hans-Peter Grahsl

@hpgrahsl

🙇‍♂️ honoured and humbled to co-present together with this talented guy at @jloveconf this Friday! 👇 twitter.com/jloveconf/stat…

18:45 PM - 22 Jun 2021

jLove - JVM festival, free, June 25th - 26th @jloveconf
A reach experience in #Java EE projects in the logistics & retail industries and running #OSS. A prolific blogger, check what he's up to currently https://t.co/sBmpz4HgUL Gunnar leads the Debezium project at @RedHat Welcome #jlove speaker @gunnarmorling , one of @Java_Champions https://t.co/CUbAKCjhfr

Obviously, projects Valhalla, Loom and Amber have received a lot of buzzes, but there is a healthy level of skepticism about the projects. Do you have any thoughts you’d like to share?

Gunnar: One of the overarching trends in Java through the last years is to opening it up for more and more use cases, which were not that much in the focus for the platform before. E.g. take SIMD support via the vector computation API (developed in the Panama project). I think it’s great how Java makes such capabilities available to a much larger number of developers.Project Amber, bringing support for long-awaited language features like records, text blocks or switch expressions. Loom for making multi-threaded programming much more approachable.
I’m really excited about seeing all these developments, I think it hasn’t been such a great time for being a Java developer as it is right now in a long time.

What is planned for Java after Java 17? How will it change the everyday life of a Java developer?

Gunnar: That’s of course up to the OpenJDK team to decide. Personally, I can’t wait to see Project Loom mature, this has a huge potential for the Java platform as a whole. The standardization of AOT compilation via Project Leyden is another think I’m really looking forward to, as again it brings Java to many new exciting use cases where it wasn’t ideally suited before.

There are Groovy, Scala, Kotlin, and many others in the family of JVM languages. What features do we miss in Java in comparison with other JVM languages? Elaborate.

Gunnar:Actually I’m pretty happy with Java, not only with the runtime environment, but also with the language. But of course there are some things to wish for, e.g. a stronger type system which prevents null pointer exceptions and allows for union and intersection types, as pioneered by Ceylon. One thing I’d really love to see is the ability to amend the AST by allowing annotation
processors to create partials for existing classes, as supported by C#. But nobody is listening to me ;)

Hans-Peter: Obviously, I don't want to start a framework flame war here. Throughout my career I've probably written most code based on Spring. This notwithstanding, I recently took a closer
look into Quarkus which I really enjoy working with so far. What’s more important though, and really inspires me the most, is the sheer breadth of different Java framework options in the wild.
The Java ecosystem is extremely strong and the many useful JVM-based open-source projects out there make the Java platform really shine.

In the beginning, Make was the only build automation tool available beyond homegrown solutions. Make has been around since 1976, and as such, it was used for building Java applications in the early Java years.However, many conventions from C programs didn't fit in the Java ecosystem, so in time Ant took over as a better alternative. Maven continues to use XML files just like Ant but in a much more manageable way. And then, Gradle was built upon the concepts of Ant and Maven. Fancy Gradle or old school Maven? Or Ant?!

Hans-Peter: After some "early adventures" with Ant during my studies I was introduced to Maven and liked it enough that I'm still almost exclusively using it today. The thing is, "my mom
always said life was like a box of gradle scripts. You never know what you're gonna get." :) The actual reason is that I was never required to work with Gradle on a regular basis, let alone need its often praised feature set. In the end, it's personal preference more than anything else.

Are we going to use modules ever? When we create a module, we organize the code internally in packages, just like we previously did with any other project. So why are packages not enough?

Gunnar: Modules allow to organize a code base into multiple packages (thus declaring public types), while still not exposing all the types to the outside world. So they are a great win when it comes to organizing larger applications into multiple cohesive units with well-defined relationships. As an opens-source software author I really appreciate the ability to clearly define and limit the public API of my libraries. So far adoption of modules has been slow, in particular as it can be challenging to migrate existing code bases which had been created not with modularity in mind. I hope there’ll be an uptake for new applications and libraries going forward.

"Having more obstacles removed is great and I hope Java will go on that track heavier", — Alexander Levin

Anastasia Khomyakova ❤ — Wed, 23 Jun 2021 01:18:01 +0000

Hello jLovers!

Our next speaker, Alexander Levin, has shared his thoughts about what is going on in the Java community!

Alex is a senior software engineer specializing in full-stack development and Kotlin. He is passionate about knowledge sharing and brings his expertise to idiomatic Kotlin. He is an active member of a community for Kotlin starters.

What new countries have you “visited” thanks to the online format?

I think... none? :D
Yeah, it happened to be mostly either Russian or German conferences, so no new countries for me.

How has your programming style with Java evolved over the past couple of years? What are some of the things that led to the significant improvements?

It's... hard to say. Partially because I am writing in different styles on different languages. Like code on Kotlin, on Scala or on Java will be 3 different types of code.
You can think that with Java evolving quickly my style can change with Java but reality is different. Like even stuff that is coming from Java 8 is sometimes hard to use. Example of that - you cannot switch fully from imperative code to functional one even with Stream API due to incompatibility with checked exceptions.

So in Kotlin you will have:

val result = input.map { service.callWithPossibleException(it, someOtherParam) }

And in Java you will have:

var result = new ArrayList<>(input.size());

for (var it: input) {

    result.add(service.callWithPossibleException(it, someOtherParam));

}

While it's not that bad in this example, it creates weird inconsistency.

What is planned for Java after Java 17? How will it change the everyday life of a Java developer?

Define "Java developer" I guess :D
While I hope it will be better soon, it's hard to say anything about changes when a lot of devs are still using Java 8.
Definitely not all of them and even for them there are ways to improve the situation (like Jabel) but the situation is still a bit sad.
But if we try to look more optimistically then the situation is interesting as we have a great balance of adding all types of stuff: security-related things, new features, performance improvements etc. I hope that this balance will stay even after Java 17 :)

There are Groovy, Scala, Kotlin, and many others in the family of JVM languages. What features do we miss in Java in comparison with other JVM languages? Elaborate.

Main thing from Kotlin and Scala 3 - extensibility and ease of use. It's great to have as few obstacles as possible when you want to quickly write something.
More concrete examples of that:
** Easy main function. Like in Java you have class, weird method notation etc, and in Kotlin you have:

fun main() = println("Hello World")

And it's pretty easy in Scala 3 as well:

@main def helloWorld() = println("Hello World")

That thing is easier to explain, easier to read and possible to quickly write even on a smartphone :)
** Extension functions

While it's debatable whether extension functions are the best approach (or something like pipe operators), having any of them is a great way to create a more fluent API and decouple unnecessary stuff from the class itself.
Unfortunately not that much progress on that from Java (except using experimental Lombok stuff or Manifold)

** Standard library functions

While you can argue that Kotlin sometimes going too far with them (example: https://kotlinlang.org/api/latest/jvm/stdlib/kotlin.collections/first-not-null-of-or-null.html) the idea of having a lot of easy to use utilities is great.
Less need for libraries like Guava/Apache Commons, more or that - it's even possible to do some short scripts without bothering with adding any libraries for convenience.

So... Yeah, having more obstacles removed is great and I hope Java will go on that track heavier :)

It's an interesting question. On one hand, I love the idea that Maven is pretty simple (at least when you don't use Ant plugins inside) and 99% of the time it just works fine with that simplicity. Also I love how it's supported in IDE.
On the other hand, I don't really like how verbose Maven is. It can be solved to some extent with Maven Polyglot project but it will kill all IDE compatibility immediately. Also when you started to be this 1% of users when not everything works great out-of-the-box Maven started to feel pretty unpleasant.
With Gradle it's kinda the opposite: sometimes it's hard to see any structure and there are a lot of ways to do the same thing. Even for the simplest stuff like adding dependency!
But if you have a "unique" problem (or at least you feel like it's unique) you can just quickly script some stuff and that's it.
On a personal level I would prefer working with Gradle right now but I wouldn't say that this choice is set in stone :)

Note: touched Ant only once so no opinion on this tool. Used Make just as "great place to put some scripts" so also hard to discuss about it as build tool :D

Alex will run his session Custom IDE inspections for effective testing on the 26th of June at 13.30 CEST! Join him!