Pragmatic people

She came from Greece. She had a thirst for knowledge.
She studied Haskell at Imperial College -
that's where I caught her eye.
She told me monads are burritos too.
I said, "In that case Maybe I have a beef with you."
She said, "Fine",
and then in thirty metaphors time she said,

"I wanna live like pragmatic people.
I wanna do whatever pragmatic people do.
Wanna sleep with pragmatic people,
I wanna sleep with pragmatic people like you."
Oh, what else could I do?
I said, "I'll see what I can do."

I showed her some JavaScript.
I don't know why,
but I had to start it somewhere,
so it started there.

I said, "Pretend undefined == null"
And she just laughed and said, "Oh you're so droll!"
I said, "Yeah?
I can't see anyone else smiling in here."

"Are you sure you want to live like pragmatic people?
You wanna see whatever pragmatic people see?
Wanna sleep with pragmatic people,
You wanna sleep with pragmatic people like me?"
But she didn't understand.
And she just smiled and held my hand.

Rent a flat above a shop,
Cut your hair and get a job.
Write a language in 10 days
and you're stuck with it always.

But still you'll never get it right,
'cos when you're debugging late at night,
watching errors climb the wall,
if you just used types you could stop it all, yeah.

You'll never live like pragmatic people.
You'll never do whatever pragmatic people do.
You'll never fail like pragmatic people.
You'll never watch Curry-Howard slide out of view.
Time flies like a Kleisli arrow
because your perspective is so narrow.

Sing along with the pragmatic people.
Sing along and it might just get you through.
Laugh along with the pragmatic people.
Laugh along even though they're laughing at you.
And the stupid things that you do,
because you think that proof is cool.

Like a dog lying in a corner,
faults will bite you and never warn you.
Look out they'll tear your insides out.
Pragmatists hate a tourist,
especially one who thinks it's all such laffs.
Yeah and the stains of faulty reasoning
will come out in the maths.

You will never understand
how it feels to live your life
with no meaning or control.
And I'm with nowhere left to go.
You are amazed untyped languages exist
and they burn so bright
while you can only wonder.

Why rent a flat above a shop,
cut your hair and get a job?
Dynamic languages are cool.
Pretend you never went to school.

Still you'll never get it right,
'cos when you're debugging late at night,
watching stacktraces 10 screens tall,
if you had types you could stop it all, yeah.

Never live like pragmatic people.
Never do what pragmatic people do.
Never fail like pragmatic people.
Never watch Curry-Howard slide out of view,
and on error resume,
because there's nothing else to do.

With apologies to Jarvis Cocker.

Designing Haskell

The other day I was struggling through quirk of Java's generics (which are implemented with type erasure). I pondered that it would have been wonderful if generics had been properly baked into Java from the start instead of being superficially retrofitted.

While I'm strengthening Java's type system, I thought, I should wish for type inference to cut out all those redundant type annotations. And if I'm going to do that, I might as well ask for closures!

Of course, some of the worst things about Java are awkward and commonly misused features, like nullability. I occasionally use it myself, but I'd prefer it if there were an alternative. And I'd gladly give up mutability, primitive types and implementation inheritance if only every other Java programmer had to give them up too.

But, I considered, would I just be imposing my personal taste on others? I mean, I like significant whitespace, but I know some other programmers inexplicably prefer curly braces.

If only there were already a magical programming language like this that I could switch to without disturbing the Java developers who are happy with things the way they are.