[jlarocco]

> As a company in the lucky position of hiring for a Haskell role you have a pool of people who have self selected to be above average in determination and smarts

[citation needed]

There's really no evidence that people choosing Haskell are any smarter or more determined than anybody else.

I'm mainly pointing this out because the Haskell community's "We're smarter than everybody" attitude is a big pet peeve of mine.

[zeta0134]

I agree with your critique about the community attitude, so I sympathize with your position. However, speaking as a non-Haskell learner with a Haskell writing friend, I don't think it's fair to dismiss the notion entirely.

Haskell is pure functional programming, and it's structure actively discourages a lot of the more common practices in iterative languages. I watched my friend struggle with a very simple web project for weeks while he was learning the language. At the end of it all though, when it finally came together and worked for the first time, he was confident about its behavior in a way I'm not sure I ever could be with the code I write regularly. (I'm a game programmer, so I write a lot of C++ and dabble in Python and Lua.)

I think there's something to be said for the journey that Haskell necessarily takes you on. I don't think the upper skill ceiling for good Haskell developers is any higher than other languages, but the barrier for entry certainly seems to be.

[tome]

> I agree with your critique about the community attitude

Please link to concrete examples of this. I'm genuinely interested in calling people out on such rudeness. The Haskell community has traditionally been modest and very welcoming and I'd like to keep it that way.

[Retra]

I've heard this before too, and I think a big part of it comes from the fact that people writing on Haskell aren't afraid to use mathematical terminology, and that comes off a snooty to most.

[tikhonj]

Haskell is non-standard and significantly different from everything else. Even if you ignore subjective qualities of the language, it takes some amount of initiative and self-selection to pick Haskell up at all, while lots of people are funneled into languages like Java, JavaScript, C#, Python by default. For example, relatively few universities (and presumably no bootcamps!) teach it at all, while it's hard to avoid programs that strongly feature Java and Python.

More generally, it makes sense for the sort of people who make non-mainstream choices to be qualitatively different from many who do go with the mainstream.

[dave2000]

You've never worked with..uh... cheaper developers who've been on a course and need everything explained 4 times and have no common sense and sniff a lot but who claim to be great Java/c#/JavaScript developers? Happens all the time. I'm guessing it's harder to bullshit the sort of person who handles hiring Haskell developers.

Plus, someone who's studying Haskell probably is smarter on average than the average developer (and no, I'm not a Haskell developer although it interests me)

[dasil003]

I understand your pet peeve, really I do, but if you look at the contrapositive statement I think you will find it hard to argue:

People who are just looking to get into software engineering for the money are unlikely to learn Haskell.

They will almost certainly learn Java, PHP, Ruby, Node or maybe even Go, but not Haskell. And looking around SV these days, there is a huge number of people around that are only in it for the money.

Not that that is a panacea... my instinct is you might end up with a very strong technical team, but one that might be more likely to miss the forest for the trees when it comes to building a successful business.

[progman]

There are many attempts to justify the practical use of Haskell. However why does the Haskell community not have just proven the superiority of Haskell by an impressing showcase of working equivalents of Eclipse, Open Office, full-blown browsers, 3D games, and things like that?

AFAIK there is _nothing_ comparable in the Haskell world!

I know things like Leksah and FP-Complete's online editor but these things are far from being comparable to power IDEs like Eclipse. Haskell, as it is today, is a nice language for study purposes and academic use but it is barely used in the industry. Haskell is by far not so practical as the Haskell community wants it to be.

People have no right to complain without suggesting solutions. So do I. My suggestion: The Haskell community should develop languages based on Haskell which are much more practical, and which use all the nice power features of Haskell - the purity of functional programming for instance. Haskell is too cool to be wasted for academic use. It could be a very nice backend for really practical languages. The first promising attempts are there - IDRIS for instance.

[dasil003]

It kind of seems like you're grinding an axe that has nothing to do with my comment. But FWIW, I agree, but I also respect that Haskell is not designed to be a "successful" industry language. I'd love better tooling for it, but I also don't think it's a do-or-die kind of situation. Haskell has a fairly stable critical mass and a slow and steady upwards trajectory.

[jlarocco]

> They will almost certainly learn Java, PHP, Ruby, Node or maybe even Go, but not Haskell. And looking around SV these days, there is a huge number of people around that are only in it for the money.

I think you're confusing orthogonal issues. Only writing code because it pays the bills really says nothing about how smart or motivated a person is. Is there a rule somewhere that dumb people can't enjoy programming and learn Haskell? On the other hand I know a few very smart people who only write code because it pays their bills.

[dasil003]

I'm not confusing anything, I just disagree with you.

It's not about smart vs dumb, it's about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. Being smart is an advantage, but it is meaningless without a massive amount of practice. There's nothing about programming that a 100 IQ person can't become competent at it.

Programming is first and foremost, an exercise in frustration. It is exacting and unforgiving in a way that few human activities are. It's somewhat unnatural. In order to excel at it I believe you need to feel an intrinsic thrill when solving a problem that surpasses all the frustration leading up that point, and you need to seek this out over and over and over.

Note that this says nothing about whether you only work for money, or even what brought you to the field. However, if you do not feel this thrill, then you will naturally gravitate towards a job where you can execute rote incantations again and again without having to face new problems. I'm sure there are people who love programming and persist in it despite being terrible at it, but I guarantee you they are far outnumbered by the hordes of wannabe tech millionaires flooding into the Bay Area as we speak, completely oblivious to how much they will actually hate and subsequently suck at programming—and those people ain't learning Haskell.

[tejon]

> Programming is first and foremost, an exercise in frustration. It is exacting and unforgiving in a way that few human activities are. It's somewhat unnatural. In order to excel at it I believe you need to feel an intrinsic thrill when solving a problem that surpasses all the frustration leading up that point, and you need to seek this out over and over and over.

This is more than two tweets long. How is it supposed to become the viral quote it deserves to be?

[dragonwriter]

> Only writing code because it pays the bills really says nothing about how smart or motivated a person is.

No, but actually bothering to learn something that isn't what is being shoveled through most major outlets is at least somewhat correlated with motivation.

[jlarocco]

After further thought, it seems like having a reputation as difficult to hire for and a reputation for attracting smart people would be two very good reasons for people "only in it for money" to learn Haskell.

[dasil003]

Not sure why you were downvoted here, I agree with you on this. The only thing is that there aren't a lot of Haskell jobs out there, and that is a far stronger signal to people looking to jump into the software industry than the nuanced opinions of industry veterans in forums like HN.

[dllthomas]

That is part of why these kinds of signals aren't stable over time.

[tome]

> Is there a rule somewhere that dumb people can't enjoy programming and learn Haskell?

No, there's no such rule. Can you possibly imagine that there might be any factors at play that affect the observed intelligence of Haskell programmers besides "a rule"?

[tome]

> Haskell community's "We're smarter than everybody" attitude

Please link to concrete examples of this. I'm genuinely interested in calling people out on such rudeness. The Haskell community has traditionally been modest and very welcoming and I'd like to keep it that way.

[jlarocco]

The comment I replied to is an example of this.

[tome]

Huh? "self selected to be above average in determination and smarts" is a far cry from "We're smarter than everybody else".

[jlarocco]

The person I replied to is a Haskell developer, talking about Haskell developers. A member of the community, talking about how smart people in the community are .

[tome]

Yes, he believes that the average smartness across Haskell developers is greater than the average smartness across all developers (as do I). This is a fairly weak claim. He did not make the claim "we're smarter than everybody else", which is a very strong claim. That's your strawman.

[AnimalMuppet]

Well, "self selected to be above average in determination and smarts" has to at least mean "we average smarter than everyone else", doesn't it?

[tome]

"Smarter than average" and "smarter than everyone else" are not synonyms.

[AnimalMuppet]

True, but...

jlarocco said two things: "There's really no evidence that people choosing Haskell are any smarter or more determined than anybody else" and "I'm mainly pointing this out because the Haskell community's "We're smarter than everybody" attitude is a big pet peeve of mine."

Note the phrases "smarter than everybody" and "not smarter than anybody else". Those are not nuanced statements, but I don't think they're intended to be absolutely exclusive statements.

Or to put it another way, if you interpret "smarter than everybody" as the claim that Haskell programmers are actually the smartest programmers, then grammatically, you also have to read "not smarter than anybody else" as the claim that Haskell programmers are as dumb as the dumbest programmers in existence - which I'm pretty sure was not jlarocco's actual claim.

[sbov]

I think the point is that learning Haskell takes time and effort outside of standardized courses, so people who learn it are, as a percent of the population that knows the language, more determined than those who use more mainstream languages.

As a simple example, even dropouts probably know Java.

[jlarocco]

That argument doesn't work because learning any programming language well takes time and effort.

[egl2016]

"more determined" -- you've obviously never dealt with Haskell tooling. :-)