From fusion at storytotell.org Thu Jun 12 09:26:10 2008 From: fusion at storytotell.org (Daniel Lyons) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 09:26:10 -0600 Subject: [Abqlispscheme] Next meeting: Sunday the 15th Message-ID: <51E3FD51-D8B8-4E8E-822C-402DEC87DAC4@storytotell.org> Did anyone prepare anything? I forgot to send out a reminder last week. :D -- Daniel Lyons http://www.storytotell.org -- Tell It! From fusion at storytotell.org Thu Jun 12 09:29:47 2008 From: fusion at storytotell.org (Daniel Lyons) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 09:29:47 -0600 Subject: [Abqlispscheme] ICFP 2008 Message-ID: ICFP 2008 is occurring from noon PDT on July 11th to noon PDT on July 14th. Details (or the lack thereof) are available here: http://www.icfpcontest.org/ I would very much like to be on a team, preferably including some people from ABQ Lisp/Scheme, but I am not unwilling to consider other languages if they are more amenable to the problem (using Haskell in spite of itself last year made things suck.) -- Daniel Lyons http://www.storytotell.org -- Tell It! From dbueno at gmail.com Thu Jun 12 09:39:06 2008 From: dbueno at gmail.com (Denis Bueno) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 11:39:06 -0400 Subject: [Abqlispscheme] ICFP 2008 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <6dbd4d000806120839v11ae5f8es3bfc03dda6b11d2c@mail.gmail.com> On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 11:29, Daniel Lyons wrote: > languages if they are more amenable to the problem (using Haskell in > spite of itself last year made things suck.) I didn't participate last year, but I'm just curious: what sucked about Haskell? -- Denis From fusion at storytotell.org Thu Jun 12 10:08:53 2008 From: fusion at storytotell.org (Daniel Lyons) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 10:08:53 -0600 Subject: [Abqlispscheme] ICFP 2008 In-Reply-To: <6dbd4d000806120839v11ae5f8es3bfc03dda6b11d2c@mail.gmail.com> References: <6dbd4d000806120839v11ae5f8es3bfc03dda6b11d2c@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On Jun 12, 2008, at 9:39 AM, Denis Bueno wrote: > On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 11:29, Daniel Lyons > wrote: >> languages if they are more amenable to the problem (using Haskell in >> spite of itself last year made things suck.) > > I didn't participate last year, but I'm just curious: what sucked > about Haskell? It's not really fair to lay all the blame on Haskell. The real problem was bad project management. We were using Haskell because we thought Haskell was cool. Haskell is cool, but only one team member was really fluent in it, and one other (me) could get by with it to some degree. The other two team members didn't know it at all and were planning on picking it up as the contest went on. You can guess how well that worked out. Now, the problem itself seemed to us to dictate a mutable data structure and the algorithm seemed to require non-local return. If you know Haskell, you see those two requirements and hear two monads. We probably could have factored it into a manual continuation-passing style, but we weren't clever enough for that, so we wound up trying to nest the two monads, in other words, using a monad transformer. Monad transformers were new to the team member who knew Haskell and definitely beyond my comprehension at that time. So we wound up with extremely complex Haskell code only one of us really could understand. I bit my tongue, thinking it would have been a lot easier and prettier in OCaml where those two requirements would not have posed a problem. I even wrote a rope data structure for OCaml after the contest (someone else made a nicer one and released it publicly). However, many of the teams that did well at ICFP last year noticed that the problem had to do with drawing images and that the organizers probably put clues into the act of drawing itself. So they built GUI applications which let them step through the drawing functions and watch them happen. This probably would have helped us debug our drawing routines, which were broken through the whole contest, but the organizers had in fact left clues: the code would draw hints on the image and then erase them so that if you had a process that just did all of the drawing at once and output a single image at the end, as ours did, you weren't able to get the clues to advance. I don't consider Haskell to be a very good language for GUI programming right now, though I guess it's fine if you're on Windows or using GTK+. I'm not sure Lisp would have fared any better on that front though. I probably place more blame on Haskell than I should. But I definitely felt after the contest that Haskell had made a complex problem more complex rather than simpler. On the other hand it seemed to me like last years contest results were much more stratified than the previous year's. It seemed that there was a chunk of 50ish teams at the top who had made varying progress, then about 130 teams that made the basics work but made no real progress (my team, Functional Healing, was in that set) and then the remaining 600 or so teams that didn't even get that far. The spread was a lot better on the Umix challenge. Also, last year's challenge didn't seem to benefit from having multiple team members as much, but that may just be that they underestimated the difficulty of getting through the first barrier. Comparing anything to the Umix contest isn't really fair though; that was really a revelation and one of the most rewarding things I've ever been a part of. -- Daniel Lyons http://www.storytotell.org -- Tell It! From rcleis at mac.com Thu Jun 12 10:18:38 2008 From: rcleis at mac.com (Richard Cleis) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 10:18:38 -0600 Subject: [Abqlispscheme] Next meeting: Sunday the 15th In-Reply-To: <51E3FD51-D8B8-4E8E-822C-402DEC87DAC4@storytotell.org> References: <51E3FD51-D8B8-4E8E-822C-402DEC87DAC4@storytotell.org> Message-ID: <56AFA63A-877C-4A93-A5ED-0729026A3A8C@mac.com> I Scheme whilst vacationing; preparing talks is like working. rac On Jun 12, 2008, at 9:26 AM, Daniel Lyons wrote: > Did anyone prepare anything? I forgot to send out a reminder last > week. :D > > -- > Daniel Lyons > http://www.storytotell.org -- Tell It! > > > > _______________________________________________ > Abqlispscheme mailing list > Abqlispscheme at mailer.hpc.unm.edu > http://mailer.hpc.unm.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/abqlispscheme From fusion at storytotell.org Thu Jun 12 14:31:41 2008 From: fusion at storytotell.org (Daniel Lyons) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:31:41 -0600 Subject: [Abqlispscheme] Next meeting: Sunday the 15th In-Reply-To: <56AFA63A-877C-4A93-A5ED-0729026A3A8C@mac.com> References: <51E3FD51-D8B8-4E8E-822C-402DEC87DAC4@storytotell.org> <56AFA63A-877C-4A93-A5ED-0729026A3A8C@mac.com> Message-ID: <14D17D25-05DD-422D-B39E-7219292A259E@storytotell.org> On Jun 12, 2008, at 10:18 AM, Richard Cleis wrote: > I Scheme whilst vacationing; preparing talks is like working. Incidentally, it's also father's day on Sunday. -- Daniel Lyons http://www.storytotell.org -- Tell It!