[Pl-seminar] Fwd: [Boston Haskell] Thursday, September 29th, 7-9pm in the MIT CSAIL Reading Room

[Matthias Felleisen]

Absolutely. And we can distribute Racket via their successful system. 


I should explain my remark. 

Version control is obviously a graph problem. 
Categories are about graphs. 
Connecting the two must happen sooner or later. 
There might even be a benefit from doing so, 
but count me as an extreme skeptic. 

None of this made me laugh and cry. 

What makes me laugh and cry when I see this kind of
announcement are the memories of encountering ordinary
programmers who complain about FP and their encounters:

"I did ML, and they showed me how to write signatures
for groups, rings, and fields. So ML is really good for
algebra, but is it good for programming?"

Substitute a whole bunch of bananas, apples, oranges, 
and other names for the various technical terms in there
and you hear this remark 100s and 1000s of times. 

FP people aren't wrong in exploiting the most abstract
form of Category theory they want and anyone can think
of in their work. But they can't be wronger (new word!)
when they use these stupid words to present it to a 
wide audience. 







On Sep 21, 2011, at 9:17 AM, Shriram Krishnamurthi wrote:

> Sorry for the group-reply, but you mean because they produced a
> running, working system (DARCS) that several real systems use?
> 
> On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 9:03 AM, Matthias Felleisen
> <matthias at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>> 
>> On Sep 21, 2011, at 1:58 AM, Aaron Turon wrote:
>> 
>>> Reid Barton will be giving a talk about a category
>>> theoretic approach to version control. The stark contrast -- if
>>> nothing else -- should serve to highlight how deep the rabbit hole
>>> goes. =)
>> 
>> 
>> Nice :-) This kind of work keeps Racket alive. Yeah! -- Matthias
>> 
>> 
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