[Haskell-cafe] XmlSerializer.deserialize?

[Hugh Perkins]

Ok good info :-)

> btw, are you read Hoar's book "Communicating Sequential Processes"? i
think that his model is very FPish and reading his book should allow
to switch your look at concurrency in right direction

No, I'll check it out.

On 7/1/07, Bulat Ziganshin <bulat.ziganshin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello Hugh,
>
> Sunday, July 1, 2007, 8:56:05 PM, you wrote:
>
> > Genuine question: please could you tell me what are the truly powerful
> features of Haskell?
>
> > Anyway, getting back to my question, there's a whole slew of
> > articles around saying that no-one uses Haskell because they're too
> > stupid. That's certainly an argument, but it possibly lacks a certain
> objectivity ;-)
>
> i agree with it. haskell represents new programming paradigm and most
> programmers are unable to learn it without help of college
>
> in other words, there is not yet enough learning infrastructure for FP
> languages. the same situation was in 80s for OOP languages. this means
> that learning FP require much more work, or, spending the same time,
> one will learn FP much worse than OOP
>
> > So... what do you see as the "Killer Advantages" that make Haskell stand
> out from the pack?
>
> i've written 8kloc "real world" program in haskell and can say what
> was killer features for me:
>
> - natural data structures and easiness of defining algorithms
> - rich set of list operations
> - easiness of use of higher-level functions
> - type inference (dropping almost all declarations)
> - strong type checking detects many errors just at compile time
> - non-updateable data simplifies algorithms development
>
> for concurrent programming:
> - it's easy to split algorithm to several parts that are run
> concurrently and exchange data
> - channels allows to organize data streams (like Unix pipes) between
> threads, non-updatability of data significantly simplifies usage of
> these data
> - MVar allows to implement shared updateable variables which
> automatically locks on their use
>
> shortly said, non-updatability of data significantly simplifies
> both usual programming and concurrency, especially later. you can do
> the same with C#
>
> it's an example how i use concurrency for data archiving and
> compression:
> - first thread scans disk and finds files to compress. it sends
> filenames to its output stream
> - second thread reads contents of these files and sends memory buffers
> filled with data read to its output stream. it also runs background
> decompression stream which decompress data from old archive
> - third thread runs one or several C streams which compress its input
> buffers and sends buffers with compressed data to output stream. it
> may be several threads that do it, making a pipe
> - fourth thread writes compressed data to output archive
>
> all four threads are started by line
>
> runP$ scanning |> reading |> compression |> writing
>
> where each thread represented by a function which has additional
> argument for exchanging data with previous and next thread in list:
>
> reading pipe = do
>   nextFile <- readP pipe
>   ....
>   writeP pipe buffer
>
> running additional background thread and exchanging information with
> it is also trivial:
>
>   decompressor <- runAsyncP decompressor
>   writeP decompressor request
>   buffer <- readP decompressor
>
> you can see module which implements this as Process.hs from
> http://www.haskell.org/bz/FreeArc-sources.tar.gz although it's
> actually only a thin layer around forkIO/Chan/MVar features
>
> you can do the same in C# although i guess that syntax overhead will
> be a bit more and allocating a lot of small non-updateable values may
> be less efficient because its GC isn't aimed to such usage
>
> btw, are you read Hoar's book "Communicating Sequential Processes"? i
> think that his model is very FPish and reading his book should allow
> to switch your look at concurrency in right direction
>
>
> --
> Best regards,
> Bulat                            mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin at gmail.com
>
>
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