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EDSL for hardworking IT programmers

Dear all,

This is my first post to this site. So hi everyone. As a tiny bit of context, I've only recently started to look into functional programming, understanding some of the foundations and writing some simple Haskell.

I came across this article on entitled "An EDSL for hard working IT programmers". It only has a few comments on the Haskell Reddit and Hacker News.

To my unexperienced eyes, the approach proposed in the article - despite the strange title and somewhat disorienting writing - is quite significant and maybe profound which is why I'm asking this community whose expertise I deeply respect. The lack of echo anywhere makes me wonder if I might be wrong and if this is in fact a fairly common approach? Could you point me to equivalent solutions or explain more about why its not significant?

Thanks a lot for helping me understand more about the state of the art in functional programming!

Jun

By jmatsushita at 2015-05-21 15:28 | LtU Forum | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 3514 reads

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Functional reactive programming

Welcome to the website!

Are you familiar with the area of functional reactive programming? At some point (in a linked article) the author says that's the area he's in, so you might want to take a look at material on that — there are both research papers and more practical implementations, including the rather well-known Elm: http://elm-lang.org/.

To be sure, I didn't read the articles in detail. And I fear I won't have the time; I have already enough well-written articles I should be reading. In fact, I'll speculate some (many?) others will think the same. Even if somebody has a good idea, if he presents it badly he can still ensure he'll be ignored.

To be sure, I'm not sure I should be posting without having read the article — I only answer because you ask about the lack of impact.

By Blaisorblade at Thu, 2015-05-21 17:37 | login or register to post comments

Yup

Hi yes, I've tried elm and read on the origins of FRP with Conal Elliot's material. From what I understand from the article linked, it is a more generic concept that can be applied to the FRP domain (though probably not the arrow based version, and I don't understand how the continuous/discrete time issue applies), but also to other asynchronous and parallelism problems and loftier goals with regards to programming in a style that is closer to the level of specifications.

Yes you're right, bad writing (and the OOP bashing, and the difficult to read API) will have probably turned off a lot of potential readers. Anyway, I'll copy paste the list of "big claims" about the problems addressed by the approach in the article, hoping it might draw some interest:

  • something for multithreaded event handling without inversion of control.
  • something for paralelization of processes: async without the wait
    for automatic thread control
  • for alternative and applicative composition of parallel IO actions
  • for indeterminism and asynchronicity effects
  • for high level programming at the specification level
  • for creating and composing applications by means of a single expression
  • for overcoming futures and promises of Scala and JavaScript making them unnecessary

All of these ideas, and using monads to address them, don't necessarily seem new, but I haven't seen them combined within a single abstraction like that elsewhere. But then again, I didn't know (maybe still don't know deeply) what a monad was just a few months ago :)

By jmatsushita at Thu, 2015-05-21 18:06 | login or register to post comments