You, Too, Can Be on the Cutting Edge of Functional Programming Research

Re:You, Too, Can Be on the Cutting Edge of Functional Progra... by noelwelsh on Wednesday May 09, 2012 @02:47PM (#3949937)

I'm sitting in a chair as I write this. Nobody else has sat in this chair today. Am I on the cutting edge of research? Similarly, writing a game in Haskell does not make you on the cutting edge of research.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:You, Too, Can Be on the Cutting Edge of Functional Progra... by batista on Wednesday May 09, 2012 @06:07PM (#3950714)

>I'm sitting in a chair as I write this. Nobody else has sat in this chair today. Am I on the cutting edge of research?

No, but you're on the cutting edge of straw-man argumentation trivializing.

Doing something that has been done very few times, or not ever, in a whole programming paradigm (building a game functionally)

is qualitatively and quantitatively different than:

doing something that has been done trivially for centuries just not in this particular day && by somebody else than you && in one piece of furniture you own (you sitting on a chair).

If you cannot understand this, I guess it makes no sense further arguing about it.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:You, Too, Can Be on the Cutting Edge of Functional Progra... by noelwelsh on Thursday May 10, 2012 @06:19AM (#3952682)

> No, but you're on the cutting edge of straw-man argumentation trivializing.

If only I was that good!

Research contributions generally have be novel AND significant. We have seen that novelty alone is not sufficient (sitting in the chair). Significant generally means applicable to a broad range of problems. Monads are significant, as one abstraction can encode a huge range of structures (containers, control flow, etc.) Building a game in Haskell is not a priori novel OR significant. People have done this before (e.g. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Frag). Haskell has good facilities for managing concurrency and state. It's not obvious to me that one would need to go beyond these to build a game. A game would probably need to bind to some C libraries but I don't see this as a significant contribution.

The original post made the following points:

- Writing a game in Haskell in novel (No. See above.)

- Writing a game in Haskell will generate significant contributions to the wider community. I don't see this.

Furthermore, it trivialised the accomplishments of both the functional programming community and those who really are on the cutting edge of research.

[ Parent | on HN ]