Probably. That's what makes a real troll effective.
Harrop had a business around OCaml and later F#. He often posted to other FP communities controversial statements, with added links to his offerings. He started not knowing much about those other languages or FP in general, but in later years he learned from people and his attacks got more sophisticated. His controversial marketing did not make him many friends, though.
Going after the real or perceived drawbacks of purely functional programming in Haskell and also its data structures was one of his favorite targets.
Before that he used similar tactics in the Lisp community. For example I remember that he once said that Lisp is not used and this can be seen that there are no Lisp mailing list archived at GMANE. Well, that one was easy. I explained to him that GMANE has a top hierarchy for Lisp, where all the mailing lists are. But that did not stop him, he discovered or made up many more problems with Lisp. ;-)
It's not that they're incorrect - they are opinion disguised as fact. The points about lacking an unsorted map are really the only substantial argument, but only if your use case absolutely needs an unsorted map. I've never specifically needed my maps to be unsorted under the hood.
The link about someone suggesting you turn off garbage collection doesn't even mention turning off garbage collection.
My main point is that it's a very ranty post, as are most of his others. I'd like him to come back with actual benchmarked code.
It's a fact.
> Are any of his critiques incorrect?
Probably. That's what makes a real troll effective.
Harrop had a business around OCaml and later F#. He often posted to other FP communities controversial statements, with added links to his offerings. He started not knowing much about those other languages or FP in general, but in later years he learned from people and his attacks got more sophisticated. His controversial marketing did not make him many friends, though.
Going after the real or perceived drawbacks of purely functional programming in Haskell and also its data structures was one of his favorite targets.
Before that he used similar tactics in the Lisp community. For example I remember that he once said that Lisp is not used and this can be seen that there are no Lisp mailing list archived at GMANE. Well, that one was easy. I explained to him that GMANE has a top hierarchy for Lisp, where all the mailing lists are. But that did not stop him, he discovered or made up many more problems with Lisp. ;-)