[pekk]

Usually, in any other area, an interface made intentionally to be unintelligible to the general public as well as a professional target audience would be derided as bad design.

In the case of Haskell, it is taken as a badge of virtue, and it is a matter of faith that the problem is just that all other programming languages have mis-educated everyone who doesn't "get religion" about Haskell.

If Haskell's interface is hard to understand, that is a problem with Haskell.

[the_af]

Haskell's interface isn't intentionally unintelligible. In fact, it's not unintelligible at all (don't confuse playful exploratory code with standard code, just like you wouldn't think obfuscated C is standard). It's just that you're unfamiliar with it. Most ideas behind Haskell are quite logical and systematic.

[gertef]

Haskell's "badge of virtue" is that it's unpopularity has freed the language creators to improve the language, to get closer to solving the extremely sophisticated problem it is trying to solve (completely safe, efficient, correct programs), without breaking anyone; not that others are miseducated

[elihu]

...and yet, some people really like programming in Haskell, and use it for all sorts of problems. Do you think they're all just pretending to have fun, or that they're obliviously unaware of the merits of mainstream languages like Java, Python, or Javascript?

[DonaldFisk]

> Usually, in any other area, an interface made intentionally to be unintelligible to the general public as well as a professional target audience would be derided as bad design.

Evidence that Haskell was deliberately made difficult to understand? And supposing this were true, why hasn't anyone made the interface more intelligible?

> If Haskell's interface is hard to understand, that is a problem with Haskell.

That's a bit like saying that if the mathematics used in the General Theory of Relativity is hard to understand, it is a problem with the General Theory of Relativity.

[dragonwriter]

> That's a bit like saying that if the mathematics used in the General Theory of Relativity is hard to understand, it is a problem with the General Theory of Relativity.

Well, but that's true; if there were easier-to-understand mathematics that had equal utility, it would be superior. The math being hard to understand is a problem, but (as far as anyone can tell), its a necessary cost with General Relativity.

So, for Haskell -- granting, for the sake of argument, that it is particularly hard to understand (which I'm not sure is really the case) -- the question is the complexity a necessary price for some benefit that is worth the cost?