[socal-piggies] Socal Piggies Hands Up

[Howard B. Golden]

Hi all,

It's nice to hear from the list again.

I've moved on in my interests. While I still write small Python 
one-offs, I'm focusing more on Haskell for larger projects. I certainly 
don't want to start a flame war, but I see enough benefits in functional 
languages to make the learning curve worth climbing for me.

In many ways, Haskell is about ten years behind Python in terms of 
adoption. The community is still heavily academic, but practically 
oriented users (like me) are joining too. One thing that Haskell needs 
to learn from Python is more concern for stability and upward 
compatibility. Major releases occur about once a year, but they often 
break old code. The Python developers long ago realized that this was to 
be avoided.

One thing I've thought about working on is taking David Mertz's great 
book, "Text Processing in Python," and reworking it using Haskell and 
Haskell's libraries. If any of you are interested in learning Haskell, 
you might find this of value to your study.

John Mitchell's blog links to an interesting discussion of functional 
programming's limited use in large companies:

http://technicae.cogitat.io/2014/07/the-future-of-programming-adopting.html

Best regards,

Howard

On 08/02/2014 01:13 PM, John Mitchell wrote:
> I'm interested in meeting. I have two talks and a class in process,
> mostly Python related.  Although I've used it nearly daily for 18 years,
> I'm still learning!
>
> I'm finalizing a talk on Automatic Parameter Optimization (sexy!),
> probably to be given at the Professional Python group.  I'd be happy to
> give that talk to this group, and/or talk about Functional Programming.