Parallel And Concurrent Programming In Haskell

What Hacker News says

1. mietekNov 2025
   Threads and locks are fundamentally the wrong abstraction for most scenarios. This is explained in complementary ways in two of the finest technical books ever written, Joe Armstrong's "Programming Erlang" and Simon Marlow's "Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell". I highly recommend both.

   Thank you for many fond memories of playing Glider and Pararena.

   thread
2. iso8859-1Aug 2024
   Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell

   https://simonmar.github.io/pages/pcph.html

   thread
3. valcron1000Jun 2024
   I recommend reading "Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell" by Simon Marlow in which he explains that back in 1997 he decided to "build concurrency right into the core of the system rather than making it an optional extra or an add-on library".
   thread
4. SyzygiesSep 2022
   Haskell can be a beautiful small language. One can enjoy it like a walk in the woods, without worrying about which typeclass models our light cone in the universe.

   My first functional language was APL; I later moved from C to Standard ML. I loved Scheme till I realized I was camping, it was getting late, and I needed to build a shelter from Y-shaped twigs. Somehow OCaml never took for me, but reading a few of its source code modules was an efficient crash course for coding in a functional language.

   What is the dream that these languages and Haskell aspires to realize? We want to slice computations in arbitrary ways and manipulate the parts as algebra. This dream of many since the first Lisp meets resistance from those who don't love algebra, but one cannot fault the aspiration: Find a way we can all code with more leverage, less effort.

   Pretend Haskell is as small as APL or Scheme. Ignore those who scoff at your primitive avoidance of an emerging Haskell pattern.

   I highly recommend Simon Marlow's "Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell". I don't know any language that handles parallel as gracefully, and one can read this book without ever seeing an >=> or <=<.

   Show morethread
5. dundariousFeb 2022
   You make a good point about IO, I forgot how it's also not great about errors (but isn't there are an IO monad with better error treatment? -- it has been several years...). I also agree about granularity and tedium, but that's orthogonal to whether exceptions are the best way to approach such errors, and I don't think they are. Even Go's approach of explicit if-return is not tedium to me, but there are even less tedious approaches, that still let you handle the handle-able errors and do some last-ditch cleanup or just panic on the unhandle-able ones like indexing errors.

   The interesting thing about Haskell exceptions are the async ones and the ability to `throwTo`, but I never really had a use for that, so on the whole, that was a bit of an encumbrance too. It's like trying to write exception safe C++ -- tedious and easy to get wrong. I remember a fair few sections of Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell that temporarily didn't handle exceptions correctly, and it often wasn't for pure pedagogical reasons. Great book though.

   Show morethread
6. rotiferJun 2020
   Here are some books that have stood out for me. They cover some of the technologies that I either have to work with, or am personally interested in.

   Effective Java by Joshua Bloch

   Practical, actionable guidelines. The first edition was the best, the second was diluted somewhat by having to cover generics, in the third he admits that he doesn't really use Java much anymore... Despite that, it's well-written and still a good book.

   The Linux Programming Interface by Michael Kerrisk

   Covers some of the history of the Linux/Unix API, describes it in detail, has plenty of examples, compares different APIs that do similar things so you can make an informed choice (e.g. System V vs. POSIX message queues).

   If any book in this list stands out for me, it's probably this one. It might be partly due to the surprise factor of how enjoyable and well-written a 1000+ page, near-reference book is.

   Programming in Haskell by Graham Hutton

   An intro to the language and how to approach problem solving from a functional P.O.V. Not as comprehensive as some other intros to Haskell, but Hutton is a good writer and educator, making it a good read.

   Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann

   Provides an overview of a number of topics related to databases, distributed systems, consensus, etc. Lots of references (many of them online) if you like that in a book. Enjoyable to read.

   Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell by Simon Marlow

   Probably a must-read if you're into Haskell; probably too esoteric if you're not... Well written.

   Type-Driven Development with Idris by Edwin Brady

   Describes a programming language similar to Haskell, but strict by default and with dependent types designed-in from the start. Also describes techniques for leveraging the type system to construct functions (the type-driven part of the title). Well written.

   Hacker's Delight by Henry S. Warren

   Low-level bit twiddling. 'Nuff said.

   Show morethread