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by dmix
2566 days ago
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> Also, people who write haskell are more inclined to share lofty/abstract/interesting-to-other-haskellers code rather than your normal day-to-day code that is massively improved/safer and benefited from haskell's features. When Rust started getting flooded with the "web" crowd of ex-Rubyists and the like there was a lot of push back from the traditional systems people (for better or worse). But one of the benefits is that these guys are typically far better at communicating and selling languages to the general developer public. I too have run into countless examples of these "beautiful" Haskell code examples but when it came down to doing real work I felt like I was left to either figure it out myself, try to connect a more abstract blog post to more practical applications, or left reading some auto-generated Haskell/library API documentation (75% was the last one). Maybe Github and Facebook et al can lend some of these resources to teaching Haskell to the public and releasing well-documented libraries which set a standard for others to follow? It may have a high learning curve like Rust, but it's far from impenetrable for your average developer. |
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I 100% agree -- this is the crowd that brings the hype (for better or for worse). I guess it's another one of those life lessons, but projects need both types of crowds (and to be honest it's not like there's a strict separation, lots of people fit in both camps).
I think Rust is actually going to eat a ton of what could have been Haskell's lunch -- it's a great typesystem for the traditional imperative language crowd and awesome performance for the ML crowd, and a completely new paradigm of data safety that neither of those crowds had before. These days I struggle to choose Haskell, but have settled on Rust for "performance critical" things (I don't really write truly low level software so take that with a grain of salt), and Haskell for everything else.
> I too have run into countless examples of these "beautiful" Haskell code examples but when it came down to doing real work I felt like I was left to either figure it out myself, try to connect a more abstract blog post to more practical applications, or left reading some auto-generated Haskell/library API documentation (75% was the last one).
> Maybe Github and Facebook et al can lend some of these resources to teaching Haskell to the public and releasing well-documented libraries which set a standard for others to follow? It may have a high learning curve like Rust, but it's far from impenetrable for your average developer.
Hugely agree, but I think it's gotta be a community effort. FPComplete is out there doing stuff, and there are lots of individual bloggers, but Haskell needs more people writing "pedestrian" programs. I think it's one of the main ways of contributing to a language that is often overlooked. I don't have any numbers, but learn you a haskell for great good has probably lead to thousands of new haskell devs over it's lifetime, even if the information in it is outdated (and some consider it not a good starting point).
To compound all this, haskell also has a documentation problem -- the machinery is there but it often doesn't get written, or people don't include the "getting started" use cases. Most popular libraries are workable but some others aren't, so it's intimidating until you really start to see the types as sufficient for understanding.
Small shameless plug, I try to write about haskell and am in the middle of a post where I make a CountMin data sketch right now, I'm not quite done with it but hope to have it done this weekend. I feel in that way I'm at least doing something to help the haskell community.