Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lucasdicioccio 2454 days ago
This comment misses the point of the article, which argues against a urban legend that Haskell is too difficult "unless you are this tall" (a Phd, an E.T., a superhuman). I also had a shot at explaining why people are already tall enough in a past short "comic strip" [0]. I think the article makes a good job re-assuring the urban legends are a myth.

Now. there are many reasons why one would want to use Haskell. For instance, to have fun, to understand better some pattern, to write expanding-brain memes, or, because they are good at solving problems with it. It is fine if your reasons do not intersect with other people's reasons. You can try finding answers whether Haskell matches your reasons in some other essays [1,2,3]. Maybe it is true for many people that their needs and desires are entirely covered with their own toolset. As a curious/optimistic person I find it incredibly pedant to say I'll never ever need to learn/use something (there's different goodness in everything).

Personally, practicing Haskell led me to appreciate the importance and trade-offs that occur when isolating/interleaving side-effects. Similarly, it gave me some vocabulary to articulate my thoughts about properties of systems. Both are super important in the large when you architect softwares and systems. There are other ways to learn that (e.g., a collection of specialized languages), but at least for me, Haskell helped me build an intuition around these topics. That said, the prevalence of negative and derailing comments in discusions about Haskell can be demotivating (but our industry is like this ️).

[0] https://patrickmn.com/software/the-haskell-pyramid/ [1] https://www.snoyman.com/blog/2017/12/what-makes-haskell-uniq... [2] https://www.tweag.io/posts/2019-09-06-why-haskell-is-importa... [3] http://blog.vmchale.com/article/functional-haskell