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Mariano Guerra 2024-05-13 15:55:39

The Alternative Implementation Problem

What I’ve concluded, based on experience, is that positioning your project as an alternative implementation of something is a losing proposition. It doesn’t matter how smart you are. It doesn’t matter how hard you work. The problem is, when you build an alternative implementation, you’ve made yourself subject to the whims of the canonical implementation. They have control over the direction of the project, and all you can do is try to keep up.

Mariano Guerra 2024-05-13 15:57:09

Inside the Cult of the Haskell Programmer

That Haskell never gained widespread adoption exemplifies a paradoxical truth in software engineering: Great programming languages aren’t always great for programming.

Joe Nash 2024-05-13 16:21:57

What on Earth

Don Abrams 2024-05-13 17:27:44

don't tell anybody I prototype ideas in haskell to make sure they work before coding them up in whatever other language my coworkers are using

Jack Rusher 2024-05-13 17:28:03

Miranda erasure 😠

Mariano Guerra 2024-05-13 17:47:24

Miranda and QuickCheck share the same problem, right time, right thing, wrong license and unwillingness to change it

(as everything I say, prefix with "from my understanding")

Jacob Zimmerman 2024-05-13 19:32:40

Idk if it’s really true, but I really like the sentiment at the end that Haskell is more about craft & art than product & function.

Alex McLean 2024-05-14 10:13:19

Strange article, not least because Haskell does have widespread adoption in some areas like finance and algorithmic music.

Alex McLean 2024-05-14 10:16:57

@Don Abrams me too! lately I've found prototyping in javascript, then firming up ideas in haskell, then porting back to javascript or whatever works really well, plus you benefit from the third system effect

Alex McLean 2024-05-14 10:19:30

The conclusion is also strange - it's true that Haskell has influenced other languages, but that was always the explicit stated aim of SPJ etc.. Rather than an unexpected result of a 'useless' exercise

Joe Nash 2024-05-14 13:31:50

It’s also such odd timing for this article. I could see an article like this 5-6 years ago maybe

Joe Nash 2024-05-14 13:31:54

Baffled

Ivan Reese 2024-05-14 04:07:20

Brief meta note — breaking with the theme of the channel, but that's moderator's privilege :)

I want to highlight that the above links by Mariano have particularly nice formatting.

  • Link title doubles as the URL, which is nice for archiving and (IIRC) for folks using assistive tech.
  • There's a clearly demarcated quote, which is nice because it gives you an appetizing taste of the article.
  • If Mariano wanted to add some commentary or his own brief summary, he could do that separately from the quote and it'd be easy to scan.
  • No need for Slack's "rich" previews (which are about as modest and meaningful as roadside billboard advertisements)
Konrad Hinsen 2024-05-14 06:56:23

Damaged Earth Catalog

We are humans and might as well get used to it. So far, remotely done power and glory—as via government, big business, formal education, church—has succeeded to the point where gross profits obscure actual loss. In response to this dilemma and to these losses a realm of intimate, community power is developing—power of communities to conduct their own education, find their own inspiration, shape their own environment, and share their knowledge with others. Practices that aid this process are sought and promoted by the DAMAGED EARTH CATALOG.

Konrad Hinsen 2024-05-14 07:00:40

This catalog is about the future of technology, with many entries explicitly about computing. There is some overlap with topics we have been discussing here, but not that much.

This raises the question of how the "future of coding" is related to wider visions of the future of technology, and to expectations about the future of humanity.

Andreas S. 2024-05-15 05:24:28

I have also pondering on this. The question of values and how we represent and communicate them came up: meaningalignment.substack.com/p/new-paper-what-are-human-values-and

📝 [New paper] What are human values, and how do we align to them?

We are excited to release our new paper on values alignment! Co-authored with Ryan Lowe, and funded by OpenAI.

Dany 2024-05-14 14:49:58

New Graphical Programming Language for Audio

Audio software development is rapidly moving towards incorporating machine learning-based processing. While research scientists are continuously presenting us with inventive results in the field of AI, there is a lack of software engineering tools to utilize these results.

Alex McLean 2024-05-14 14:52:21

Sure looks like code to me

Duncan Cragg 2024-05-14 20:59:32

How long can you all keep this up before this great new formatting trend gets broken?

Oh ... sorry

Mariano Guerra 2024-05-17 10:07:48

Bend: a parallel language

With > Bend > you can write parallel code for multi-core CPUs/GPUs without being a C/CUDA expert with 10 years of experience. It feels just like Python!

No need to deal with the complexity of concurrent programming: locks, mutexes, atomics... > any > work that can be done in parallel > will > be done in parallel.

Twitter announcement (includes a short video demo)

After almost 10 years of hard work, tireless research, and a dive deep into the kernels of computer science, I finally realized a dream: running a high-level language on GPUs. And I'm giving it to the world! Bend compiles modern programming features, including:

  • Lambdas with full closure support

  • Unrestricted recursion and loops

  • Fast object allocations of all kinds

  • Folds, ADTs, continuations and much more

To HVM2, a new runtime capable of spreading that workload across 1000's of cores, in a thread-safe, low-overhead fashion. As a result, we finally have a true high-level language that runs natively on GPUs!

Nicolay Gerold 2024-05-17 10:28:43

I am really curious how they want to integrate it with the rest of the AI stack.

Jacob Zimmerman 2024-05-17 16:11:10

In my experience with CUDA, you really have to be paying attention to hardware details like thread block size, banked memory layout and access patterns. I’m not sure if what I learned is still up to date, but don’t cache misses cause sequential processing?

I really like the idea behind their system, I’d love to learn more about their GPU runtime in particular though. In my experience I was very grateful for C & CUDA, do others agree? Though at times I felt that even they were too high level.

EDIT: This comment feels a bit pessimistic, it’s very cool, and I’m sure a large group could benefit from this.

Dany 2024-05-19 04:22:09

I liked the video from Fireship. It's short, gets to the point and has some nice animations.

youtu.be/HCOQmKTFzYY?si=A2ebs9Tg3eRsA3uP

Eli Mellen 2024-05-17 13:04:22

Once upon a time somewhere here, lost to the sands of a freemium slack instance, I shared a link about research some friends of mine were doing through the developer success lab on code review anxiety. Today they published the workbook that they produced from that research!