So long Haskell, and thanks for all the functional fish

I've realized I haven't written or read a line of Haskell in the past 6 months. After roughly ten years of tinkering with it, it seems that I've given up on it. There is a big obvious reason, and other smaller ones.

Professionally, my job got a lot more challenging (I'm officially an **architect** now, which means I still write lots of code but I have to draw pretty diagrams too (-: ) and involves a lot of research and learning new stuff, things like microservices, docker, messaging, Angular2, mobile apps, etc. So a lot of my time is dedicated to work or to learning for work, so I don't have the time to play around with something quite unrelated like Haskell.

I suppose to be honest there also was a bit of lassitude with Haskell. I got tired of the less than optimal IDEs, I realized Haskell was not going to get me a great job, and there were a few little skirmishes on the web that got ugly and made me see the community in a less favorable light.

This was fun, though, and I certainly learned a lot, and I hope it has made me a better programmer. A lot of my coding now is done in Java 8, and it's good to be able to apply some functional idioms practiced in Haskell, and more general ideas like data immutability, small pure functions do help make better - more testable, easier to understand - code.

So maybe I'll come back to Haskell some day, but not for now. To all the open source projects I've contributed, I wish you the best!

Happy Haskell (or any other language) Hacking!

Circling through ideas

I can't make my mind up about what to do in my free time (I have some, yes yes). I keep circling between the same ideas, thinking "that would be good", then jumping to the next one.

• Keep on working on EclipseFP and other Haskell IDE related ideas. I would like for example to unify the storage of metadata between buildwrapper, scion-browser and eclipsefp, to have one database to would keep library information (definitions, documentations) like scion-browser, AST with types like buildwrapper, usage references like the usage DB in EclipseFP. It could be interesting to try to use that database to drive an IDE and have a clear repository of metadata. But then I'm tired of working on my own on EclipseFP, and when I see that Leksah really has also one active maintainer, I think people are really not interested in advancing Haskell IDEs, they must be happy with Emacs/vi and ghc-mod at a push, so why bother?
• Then I think working on games is fun! I had fun writing Mazes of Monad, and other little games, and I do enjoy playing role playing or adventure games (I can really recommend the last one I've completed, the Longest Journey), so maybe writing a game the reactive way or even for Android like the guys at Keera Studios do would be a good use of my time. Then I remember I'm a programmer that sucks at graphics design and would probably suck as much at game design.
• Games are too trivial, let's do something that will change the world, like work on AI! A few books I've read like Kurzweil's and Hawkins' have been truly inspirational, so maybe I could write some HMM neural temporal gizmo that would become sentient over night!! Then I wake up. People smarter than me and with more time than me are already working on that, so I would not contribute anything anyway. Why don't I help these people by providing a better programming experience, for example a Haskell IDE? Back to idea 1!

Ah well, I'll go back to browsing Reddit!

Fame at last!

I was reading the book "Haskell Data Analysis Cookbook" when suddenly, my name pops up! Funny to see a link to a 7 year old blog entry, who knew I would go down in history for a few line of codes for a perceptron? It's deep in Chapter 7, for those interested. Maybe this is a sign that I should abandon everything else and spend my time on AI, since it's obviously where fame and riches abound! Right...

Yoohoo: mazes of monad is kind of popular!

Don Stewart has published some statistics on packages popularity here . MazesOfMonad is the fastest rising application over the past 4 months. Thanks to all people who downloaded it, hope you enjoyed it, feel free to send me bug reports or enhancement requests. Hopefully I'll find the free time (in between day work, family, sports, etc.) to develop another more ambitious game in the coming months!