[Haskell-cafe] How Albus Dumbledore would sell Haskell
rfhayes at reillyhayes.com
Wed Apr 25 23:06:14 EDT 2007
I don't know how many of the other people on this list are actually
going to *be* at OSCON. I will.
I think it is important to think about the kinds of problems the
audience is trying to solve, as well as the context in which they are
trying to solve them. For the most part, the attendees at OSCON work
on system software: operating systems, operating system services
(printing, packaging, scheduling, etc), network & distributed
computing infrastructure, databases, languages, and every imaginable
variation on the word web.
1) Build a simple database access layer that is immune to SQL
injection attacks from user input (using the type system to guarantee
that safety). Include the FFI portion (FFI is a point of paranoia
about any "new" language). Now the, the audience values the type
2) Show something appallingly simple, yet blazingly fast.
Demonstrate that it is blazingly fast. I would implement "wc -l"
using data.Bytestring.lazy and run in over a huge file. It's a one
line program and it will run faster than the built in unix command.
Explain that its fast because of GHCs rewrite rules. Explain that
the rewrite rules are only possible because of purity. Now the, the
audience values purity.
3) Build a simple combinator framework that supports multiple
evaluation schemes (like your derivative framework that supported
both valuation and settlement processes). For this audience, it
might be cool to build a simple package system that both installed
software and later verified the integrity of the installation.
Although, if you *wanted* to present "How to write a financial
contract" I could not object. Quantitative finance is my business
and I promise to be in the audience for this.
Also, see if Audrey Tang is going to be present. If she is, consider
enlisting her support. Haskell has *enormous* credibility in the
Perl 6 community because of PUGS. I recently had a conversation with
Jesse Vincent, the Perl 6 program manager. He said that the
majority of the Perl 6 community is aware that PUGS (and therefore
Haskell) are crucial to the success of Perl 6. Perl has its own
track at this conference.
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