[alanh]

I know a few Elm developers. Using a less mainstream language can actually be a boon to hiring. (Isn’t there a classic PG essay on how ViaWeb benefitted enormously from using a Lisp when no competitors did?)

> Had our first hire start today who applied because we use @elmlang in production. He rocked it!

> PS: still hiring :)

https://twitter.com/rtfeldman/status/656238188961226752

Furthermore, I’ve learned so many languages on the job in my career that I am unsympathetic to companies who refuse to believe that people who have learned programming can continue to learn programming!

[kornish]

PG has a couple essays directly related to this topic. The first about using a language which is implicitly more powerful than others ("Beating the Averages") [1] and the other is about how using a less common language is a positive selector in the hiring process ("The Python Paradox") [2].

[1]: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html [2]: http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html

[omtanks]

Agree on the first. On the second, "And people don't learn Python because it will get them a job; they learn it because they genuinely like to program and aren't satisfied with the languages they already know.". I disagree, I like to solve problems more in Java. I tried several including Python over the years. I'm asked to do something in Python I will but for my money, Java is more readable than Python. It's an acute and false observation that he made. Less common does not necessarily equate to smarter/better/faster.

[dllthomas]

This was dramatically more true of Python when he wrote it than presently. FWIW, I've recently been using Python for a job and find it deeply unsatisfying. I'm inclined to think that current-gen Java may well be better; the last time I used Java in anger it was basically a different language. Though to be fair, truly modern Python is also a bit different than what I've been working in.

[smt88]

PG isn't God, and he related a single anecdote. I won't believe that argument unless I see current data that's language-specific.

For example, I could imagine easily being able to hire devs to work on Go, but it'd probably be really hard to get them to work on Haskell.

[alanh]

> PG isn't God

Can you prove that? Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, after all. You’re being a bit militant in your pg-atheism.

Okay, in all seriousness, you are correct. Ability to hire coders to work in a particular language is a legitimate concern to have. Still, it’s sad to see lack of usage drive, well, lack of usage – sometimes it looks to me like an unexamined assumption, or a self-fulfilling prophecy. To take it back to the land of religious arguments: it’s a bit cargo-culty.

[smt88]

I agree with what you're saying, but "low popularity" is just one mark on one side of the pros/cons list.

New languages can outweigh low popularity with lots of other important qualities: syntax, tooling, appropriateness for a certain purpose, abundance of libraries, etc. If the new language is easy to learn, that pretty much defeats the issue of low popularity all together!

Unfortunately, a lot of new/amazing languages with great tooling are somewhat hard to learn. Again, Haskell might be a great language, but it's daunting to people who only have experience with C-like languages.

Go is one of the exceptions, and I think it did that intentionally. Instead of having complex syntax, it just has lots of boilerplate. It's easier to read and easier to learn at the expense of being harder to write and harder to modify.

[klibertp]

> New languages can outweigh low popularity with lots of other important qualities [...] abundance of libraries, etc.

How?

> If the new language is easy to learn, that pretty much defeats the issue of low popularity all together!

If the language is easy to learn it's probably not worth learning. "Easy to learn" in most contexts and for most people means "similar" or "familiar".

Of course, there are languages truly easy to learn thanks to their small surface and internal consistency (like Erlang, PicoLisp, Forth...) but they are very rarely regarded as such.

> Again, Haskell might be a great language, but it's daunting to people who only have experience with C-like languages.

My opinion is that it's their problem, not Haskell's. Instead of "being daunted" they should go polyglot already and stop whining.

[smt88]

> > New languages can outweigh low popularity with lots of other important qualities [...] abundance of libraries, etc.

> How?

By "new" I didn't necessarily brand new. I meant something like Rust, Go, or Julia. They're more than 3 years old and relatively fully-baked, but they're much younger than the mainstream languages.

I don't know much about Julia, but in the Rust and Go communities, the early adopters are producing libraries for the not-so-early adopters. A good question would be, "Why?" I think the answers are: 1) fun, 2) because they want to get others to use the language, and 3) because their company has adopted the language in production.

So it does (and has to) happen. In this whole thread, I'm not talking about the decision-making process of an early adopter. I'm talking more about someone replacing a mainstream language in a production or business environment.

> "Easy to learn" in most contexts and for most people means "similar" or "familiar".

I meant "easy to learn" however you want to define that. Similar/familiar is fine, as it's definitely contributing to the popularity of Rust and Go. It really does hurt some excellent languages (e.g. OCaml) that they look so alien to mainstream, working programmers.

> My opinion is that it's their problem, not Haskell's

That's true. A language should have whatever syntax is most effective and not make the same mistakes that past languages made.

However, that's not the same thing as readability. A language can be totally different from C-family languages and still be readable. To mention OCaml again, I find it ridiculously hard to read because there are tiny, similar-looking characters that are significant all over the place. To my eye, significant dots and tildes are very hard to pick out when I'm scanning down a page.

So assuming Haskell is readable to a complete newbie, it isn't Haskell's problem that the syntax is new. But it is Haskell's problem if it can't overcome the catch-22 that people don't use a language if other people don't use it.

I'm glad we're talking about Haskell, because that community is very enthusiastic and has made some incredible, accessible Haskell resources to solve this problem. It may not be their problem, but they're still attacking it, as every language has to. It seems to me that the Rust community knows this and is going in the same direction with highly-accessible tutorials.

As for Go, the language is so small that it's "easy to learn" in terms of syntax, but the patterns and paradigms you use in Go might take longer as a result.

[klibertp]

> It really does hurt some excellent languages (e.g. OCaml) that they look so alien to mainstream, working programmers.

How will you explain a relative success of F#, then?

In my opinion "looking alien" is not important at all. To the mainstream real qualities are much less important than marketing; that's true in many areas and mainstream programming is not an exception. Given enough marketing, you can turn "alien syntax" into a perceived advantage relatively easily.

> To mention OCaml again, I find it ridiculously hard to read because there are tiny, similar-looking characters that are significant all over the place.

Have you seen J? I'll just paste a bit of code in it:

   join =: 1 : 0
    ((([:{.[:>{.),:[:([:<(>"0))"1[:{:[:1 2 0&|:[:>([:,u"0)#]) (pr y))
   )

Is it readable? I'm told that yes, it is. There are people who can read this mess just fine, no problems at all.

Readability is an artifact of familiarity and, in some cases, tooling. You can get used to reading (and writing) even the most "unreadable" of syntaxes. Ask a PERL programmer if she finds her language readable. Will she say "no"?

My point is: until readability is formally defined and we're able to measure it objectively it's utterly useless to talk about it.

> But it is Haskell's problem if it can't overcome the catch-22 that people don't use a language if other people don't use it.

Yes, but this problem cannot be solved with technical qualities alone. Was it possible we wouldn't use C, Java or JavaScript at all.

It's marketing and "killer use-cases" that matter. You want to use the same language your OS is written in, for example. Was Windows written in OCaml you'd use OCaml to write Windows programs. If there's a program you really like, which is scriptable in Lua, you will use Lua.

[eru]

> [..] but it'd probably be really hard to get them to work on Haskell.

I've been on both sides of Haskell hiring. There's more people who want nice Haskell jobs than Haskell jobs advertised these days.

[walterbell]

Any recommendation on a good place to post Haskell jobs?

[codygman]

Attempted to sort by reach/relevance:

http://reddit.com/r/haskell

https://mail.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe

http://www.haskellers.com/jobs

http://functionaljobs.com/

http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs (more general, but I see Haskell jobs here and look for them here)