[Haskell-cafe] Byte Histogram

[Johan Tibell]

Hi,

Thanks for bringing up these issues. It's something we could be better
at addressing as a community.

First, we need to stop pretending that you can use Haskell effectively
without first learning to reason about program evaluation order.
Learning how is not terrible difficult, but there's very little
material on how to do it [1]. Some of us have learnt it the hard way
by experimentation or by talking to people who do understand lazy
evaluation [2] (the Simons, Don, and Bryan to name a few). At the very
least we need to teach people how to tell which arguments a pure
function is strict in by looking at its definition.

Second, many of our core data structures are lazy, but most uses are
strict. That keeping a simple map of counters is tricky should tell us
that something is wrong (you need to use insertWith'). It wouldn't be
if Data.Map was strict in the values. Many strictness related problems
people have are due to common data types like Maybe, tuples, and
arrays being lazy. This is rarely what you want.

1. I tried to start creating some. For example, by giving a high
performance Haskell talk at CUFP. Unfortunately the talk wasn't taped.
2. Haskell is non-strict, which doesn't necessarily imply lazy
evaluation. However, lazy evaluation is what we actually deal with.

Johan