[tt] [FoRK] Superhuman feats of programming expression

Sun Feb 3 20:10:55 UTC 2008

----- Forwarded message from Jeff Bone <jbone at place.org> -----

From: Jeff Bone <jbone at place.org>
Date: Sun, 3 Feb 2008 12:13:55 -0600
To: Friends of Rohit Khare <fork at xent.com>
Cc: Rob Mayoff <mayoff at dqd.com>
Subject: [FoRK] Superhuman feats of programming expression 
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.752.2)
Reply-To: Friends of Rohit Khare <fork at xent.com>

..was Re: The Arc Challenge:  Tastes great!  Less filling!

--

You know, I hate to keep beating up Paul Graham's attempts to enable  
us all to write less code.  I'm HUGELY in favor of that!  But when I  
look around at real, massive feats of terse programming machismo...   
I hate to say it, but the hands-down winner seems to be Haskell!  For  
example, LoCs in:

  xmonad:  3683	# an X-windows window manager
  darcs: 8381		# a distributed revision control system
  frag: 11223		# an OpenGL first-person shooter
  pugs: 38972       # beat the official Perl 6 by... *years*
  zipper:	1001       # a toy OS / file system

...and the list goes on.*  For just about every major category of  
software you can imagine, some lone Haskell hacker (or group of  
hackers) has put together a Haskell version that, relative to a  
similarly-full-featured implementation in any other language, *is  
smaller.*  I won't even add insult to injury by mentioning that a  
popular late-night or long-weekend hack for Haskell dabblers is  
throwing together a toy Lisp or Scheme.  (Oh well, there I went and  
did exactly that.  Point being, you sure as hell don't see the  
opposite happening!)  Cf.

  http://halogen.note.amherst.edu/~jdtang/scheme_in_48/tutorial/ 
parser.html

or

  http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp-in-haskell.html

Note that I'm completely omitting from this list the usual crop of  
web servers, template systems, wikis, blog engines, etc.  There are  
many of those available in Haskell, but hardly worth mentioning as  
they tend to clock in at such a small amount of code.  (Note too that  
the fact that all of the above are  clocking in at order 10k LoC in  
the case of the largest may in fact reflect an upper limit beyond  
which no human being can even *think* about a Haskell program! ;-)   
(Actually I have an existence proof to the contrary:  House, an  
rather serious bootable bare-metal OS written in Haskell, clocks in  
at about 370k LoC.  Not sure how much of that's the kernel.   
Lightweight serious kernels have historically started at around 100k  
on the very low side, early Plan 9 being the LoC leader AFAIK.)

Now, don't get me wrong;  I'm EXTREMELY vexed about this state of  
affairs, as Haskell is a programming language that, no matter how  
many runs I've made at that fence, I can never seem to get anything  
useful *done* in.  I'm fine in theory, but when it comes to actually  
stitching together IO and exceptions and all that, I find that my  
head explodes.  And I'm tired of cleaning gray matter and blood  
splatter off the walls of my home office!

I'd MUCH rather see people doing this sort of thing in Lisp!  Why  
aren't they?

That's a serious question!

jb

* Note that my incorrect recollection was that all of these came in  
at around 4k LoC.  Thus my previous humorous conjecture --- that  
*any* program could be written in less than 4k LoC (or 5k, or  
whatever) was clearly wrong.  My bad.  Made for a good joke, though.

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Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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