Software Simply

Over and over again I have seen people ask how to get a full time job programming in Haskell. So I thought I would write a blog post with tips that have worked for me as well as others I know who write Haskell professionally. For the impatient, here's the tl;dr in order from easiest to hardest: IRCLocal meetupsRegional gatherings/hackathonsOpen source contributionsWork where Haskell people work First, you need to at least start learning Haskell on your own time. You had already started learning how to program before you got your first programming job. The same is true of Haskell programming. You have to show some initiative. I understand that for people with families this can be hard. But you at least need to start. After that, far and away the most important thing is to interact with other Haskell developers so you can learn from them. That point is so important it bears repeating: interacting with experienced Haskell programmers is by far the most important thing to do.…

While writing this comment on reddit I came up with an interesting question that I think might be a useful way of thinking about programming languages. What percentage of single non-whitespace characters in your source code could be changed to a different character such that the change would pass your CI build system but would result in a runtime bug? Let's call this the software fragility number because I think that metric gives a potentially useful measure of how bug prone your software is. At the end of the day software is a mountain of bytes and you're trying to get them into a particular configuration. Whether you're writing a new app from scratch, fixing bugs, or adding new features, the number of bytes of source code you have (similar to LOC, SLOC, or maybe the compressed number of bytes) is rough indication of the complexity of your project. If we model programmer actions as random byte mutations over all of a project's source and we're trying to predic…