This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Scala Buzz
by Jeff Heon.
Original Post: The Downward Spiral: from Scala to Haskell to Clojure
Feed Title: The Careful Programmer
Feed URL: http://thecarefulprogrammer.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
Feed Description: A (starting) collection of my musings about programming. I'll brush more often on Scala related topics since I am currently learning it.
Warning I'm afraid this entry is going to be more rambling than substance. There are two points on which I do would like to have feedback though. I'll put them in red so you can skip my fool's babbling and get directly to them.
Scala About a year ago I got interested in Scala. I bought the Programming in Scala book and begun reading it selectively, concentrating on the functional programming part, something I want to learn. I got to like the idea of passing functions around as a way to customize functionality and I appreciated the use of case to deconstruct lists in small recursive functions. Of the three languages, Scala is the one I fiddled with the most although I did not even do a hobby sized project. I only worked on toy examples.
Haskell One thing led to another, I got introduced to Haskell when I stumbled upon Tony Morris Haskell exercises for beginners. Since Scala has some roots in Haskell, I thought it'd be nice to learn a bit about Haskell. I begun by reading Haskell-Tutorial by Damir Medak & Gerhard Navratil. It was a bit dry for me since my mathematical notions are more than a 15 years away. I followed that up with part of "A Gentle Introduction to Haskell". I had to read and reread parts of it several times. It's not any failure of the text, it's really trying to hammer in these new (for me) notions in my head and again, the dusty maths. It's been very interesting to me and I liked the infinite data structures. Later though, my mind almost entered a infinite recursive loop itself trying to understand the client-server example in the lazy pattern section. I read a lot about Haskell but almost did nothing in it. I was puzzled while pondering the interactive environment prompt: "But how do I test anything without side effects?" I was unsure even how to assign the result of a function to a variable. I read a bit about monads but in the end, I decided to pre-order the book Real World Haskell and give it a rest meanwhile. As an aside, I was unsure if infinite lists were possible in Scala until I saw Infinite Lists for the Finitely Patient by Daniel Spiewak.
After that, I decided to have a quick look at F#. Now I hadn't written any Haskell, but I had read about it intensively for a few weeks. I was following along nicely until I saw a function example with a call to print something and I actually gasped. "Sacrilege!", I thought, and then remembered I was not in Haskell anymore and that F# is more like of a mix language like Scala.
Clojure Things got quiet for a while until Clojure was mentioned in some article. I had a really quick look and thought: "Eek! Lisp!" It got mentioned again one too many time for me to ignore and decided to have a look at it. I went to the official website and was really surprised to see such clean layout and a beautiful logo for the language. I saw the introduction screen cast for java programmer. It turned out the the language designer is a good speaker (I was expecting something mind numbing like the recording message of the Asus support line) , with strong opinions but not fanatic at all. Clojure has been designed with specific goals in mind and is the result of practical experience. Nothing seems whimsical about it; every compromise carefully weighted in.
Lisp This is my fourth brushing with Lisp. The first one was at the university. We were learning Scheme and the professor was brilliant, but unfortunately I prematurely shut down my mind to it without giving it a shot. We were explained Scheme was a functional language and as such, a function would always return the same result when called with the same parameters. Also mutability of variables was presented as something of a trick since variables should not change. I then thought something about the lines of "How can we do anything without changing variable values? What kind of language would need something so essential to be done as a hack!?" I wanted nothing to do with Scheme anymore. It's also a shameful anecdote that being young, arrogant and hot-blooded, I went as far as personally insulting Lisp and John McCarthy on a Usenet forum.
I encountered Lisp for the second time about 10 years later on Paul Grahams website. I found The Roots of Lisp to be very interesting and I tried to give Lisp a shot and read partway through Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum Days by Dorai Sitaram. I was intrigued and baffled by practical applications of nondeterminism! Still, I was also busy learning C# and ASP.NET at the time to earn a living, and thus put Lisp aside.
My third encounter with Lisp was when I went to see this excellent text Functional Programming For The Rest of Us by Slava Akhmechet (I love reading about computer science history) and then found The Nature of Lisp by the same author. Fascinating stuff, but I still put Lisp aside.
Give & Take Scala & Haskell have a lot of syntax. Clojure has little syntax. I just haven't done enough Lisp or Clojure to get used to it and so for now, I prefer at least a little syntax to be able to parse the flow control of a program. So in that regards, I prefer the former family of language. On the other hand, sometimes things can get complicated to grasp with so much syntax. As Scala & Haskell can't modify themselves like Clojure, new syntax must be injected as best as possible but this gives rises to small differences or context differences having a big impact on the meaning of the program and human parsing ain't so easy anymore. Again, lack of experience prevents me from comparing with Clojure. I suppose trying to understand a function using several layers of macros must be difficult too.
As an aside, I'm wondering something about closures, doesn't it defeat a little the purpose of functional programming to have a function which can modify a value outside the function itself? Isn't it a bit like programming with global variables? This is not a critique, just thinking out loud.
JVM & Java API Both Scala (JVM mostly and .NET) and Clojure (JVM) have chosen to target a virtual machine and it's a great decision with a lot of advantages. But on the downside, I feel it is forcing newcomers to learn Java on top of the Java API. I feel that in that regards, the .NET framework is more agnostic. The documentation does not presuppose a particular language and usually propose code examples in many languages, granted only the Microsoft ones. What I mean is you can use the .NET framework and it's documentation with, let's say, vb.NET, and it does not feel like you have to know C# in order to use it well. It'd be nice to have something more like that when you're learning Scala or Clojure. Of course, the comparison is a bit unfair because if you are using the .NET framework with a non-Microsoft language, you'd be in exactly the same situation.
(Somewhat of a) Conclusion Things have gone full circle now that I'll soon be getting the printed edition of Programming in Scala. I'll get back into it and hopefully get a good grasp of it. Real Work Haskell will be waiting just around the corner (of the book shelve.) I still haven't made up my mind yet about preordering Programming Clojure by Stuart Halloway, but it's more than likely.
I don't know if one of these three languages will become my new favorite, but hopefully I'll have a pretty good understanding of functional programming after all that! If nothing else, I'll be ready for the additions of closures in the Java language if it ever happens, or be able to start using the functional Java library when I finally get to use a jdk > 1.4 at work!
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