67 lines
4 KiB
Markdown
67 lines
4 KiB
Markdown
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---
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author: Sanchayan Maity
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title: Another Haskell and Clojure Post
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tags: haskell, clojure
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---
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<p style='text-align: justify;'>Been a while since I wrote about anything here
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but it's time to be regular about this again. And oh no! Another Haskell and
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Clojure post, just like so many others on the web. Well this will be about my
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experience.</p>
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<p style='text-align: justify;'>I don't remember how I heard about Haskell the
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first time, but, since then I have tried at least thrice to pick it up. Two times
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I tried with the book Learn You a Haskell for great good and the other time I
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tried referring Real World Haskell. Neither of them stuck with me, even though
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the LYAH book is recommended quite a lot. This last June I came across Haskell
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Programming from First Principles. After reading the reviews online and checking
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out a pirated copy, I decided it was definitely worth it. Yes, I had an ebook
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version of it, but I still bought it on my birthday after spending 4000+ INR on
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it. I gave it as a present to myself and boy was it worth it, worth every penny.
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</p>
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<p style='text-align: justify;'>Let's digress a bit to talk about Clojure and
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we will come back to Haskell in a while. I was also trying to learn Clojure for
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a while now. Having read about "code is data and data is code" in the context of
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LISP languages, I wanted to try it out. The only dialect worth trying it seemed
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to me was Clojure. Now while I do not care about Java and find it too verbose,
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it cannot be denied that the JAVA ecosystem gives one access to a lot of things.
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And while I might not land a Haskell job in India, I might just land one with
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Clojure. So seemed practical as well.</p>
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<p style='text-align: justify;'>I was taking CS 425 Database class in the summer
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semester and the professor wanted us to do a JDBC assignment with one of RDBMSes.
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I thought what better oppurtunity than this to try some Clojure. So I wrote an
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application in Clojure which automates running of TPC-H queries for measuring
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database performance. I used the JDBC driver for Postgres.</p>
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<p style='text-align: justify;'>Coming from C which is a weakly typed language
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Clojure's dynamic typing did not go well down with me. While it was fun to
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program in Clojure, but, I would make stupid mistakes and then only find them
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at run time. This is a problem with all dynamically typed languages. There is
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the source to sink problem. The origin point of error would be somewhere else
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and the stack trace or exception would originate somewhere else. This is not
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at a problem while programming in Haskell. Haskell's strong typing nature can
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catch all such errors at compile time. I personally prefer this. Stupid people
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like me who cannot keep all of the code in the head at any given time, prefer
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to leverage the type system and compiler for not facing such problems.</p>
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<p style='text-align: justify;'>Haskell's code is also much more pleasing to my
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eyes than Clojure/LISP's parenthesis style since I find the former easy to parse
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than the latter. Although LISP style makes sense since it is an abstract tree
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representation as well of the code, but, still nah!. Though given a choice to
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not work in Embedded/C and with no Haskell shop around, I would like to work in
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Clojure.</p>
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<p style='text-align: justify;'>So I am trying to learn Haskell at the moment
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from the Haskell book and currently at Foldable chapter. Ten more chapters to
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go before I can call myself a beginner Haskeller. After that it will be time
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to learn some Yesod and go through Simon Marlow's Parallel and Concurrent
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Programming in Haskell. Also I have now switched from using Jekyll for my blog
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to using Hakyll. The blog as is currently, is in pretty early stage. I have some
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things to figure out like taking care of code snippets and highlighting them
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properly. But using Hakyll will also allow me to play around with Haskell. I
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do not give a crap about Ruby anyway on which Jekyll is based. Also intend
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to switch to xmonad from i3, however my xmonad configuration still requires some
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work before I can make it work just like i3.</p>
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