[gridlockd]

> The 3rd rewrite of your nodejs app still has technical debt. It still has flaws and still is buggy. Every time you redo it, you repeat the same mistakes over and over and over again never knowing how to make things better.

Oh really? Well that's good news too, because now I can just save myself those rewrites, because they're pointless. That's a 3x improvement right there.

> It's a myth that Haskell is slower. The speed I would say is the same because Haskell you would require significantly less testing and validation.

If you have wizards, that is.

> Haskell is about safety and good design. If these two things are not critical to your program, then you shouldn't go the way of Haskell.

They certainly aren't critical to your run-of-the-mill NodeJS/Angular project which, I must remind, is the alternative that we are discussing here.

> If Haskell has a critical flaw it's the learning curve. But that's a one time deal.

No, it's a "one time per hire" deal.

> Also don't call us wizards. We're not... Haskell isn't that hard.

I'm certainly not calling all Haskell programmers wizards, I'm referring to that "team of experienced developers that had built large applications in other languages (and then arrived at Haskell as a better solution)" that the original commenter saw as a requirement for success.

Of course it's not impossible to assemble such a team for a run-of-the-mill project. It's just impractical.

> Becoming an expert database SQL ninja admin on postgresql is probably just as hard as becoming one on haskell.

See, that's another kind of expert that I definitely don't want to need on the team. I want people who have a basic understanding of SQL, with a reluctance to learn the ins and outs of it. That'll dramatically lower the chances of them trying to be smart with SQL.

[Quekid5]

> If you have wizards, that is.

I'd just like to call attention to this. There is no wizardry to learning (basic) Haskell very well, i.e. to such a degree that using an Elm-like library would not be an obstacle to getting the job done.

You may not ever learn advanced Category Theory, but that -- contrary to popular belief -- is not actually necessary. You may end up using some libraries that use Category Theory at an advanced level (lens), but at absolute worst we're talking learning to parse compiler error messages that are about 1-5% of what a C++ compiler will spit out at you.

Also... when did we want to stop learning?

[crimsonalucard]

>Oh really? Well that's good news too, because now I can just save myself those rewrites, because they're pointless. That's a 3x improvement right there.

No dude don't even write it because likely it will be garbage. If you truly believe that nodejs apps don't need to be rewritten go to Uber. They never rewrote their entire nodejs code base in Golang.

>If you have wizards, that is.

Haskell isn't all wizards. It's just regular people who learned something different.

>No, it's a "one time per hire" deal.

Same with almost every other language that isn't popular yet. Rust and golang and kotlin and swift all went through this. The goal of any language is to become popular enough to get past this.

>I'm certainly not calling all Haskell programmers wizards

Then what is the big deal. If we aren't wizards then it's easy to learn. Programmers learn new languages all the time. Learning Haskell is just slightly more challenging and not a huge drain on productivity. Spend a couple more months training new developers in exchange for a 90% reduction in bugs and much better design.

>See, that's another kind of expert that I definitely don't want to need on the team. I want people who have a basic understanding of SQL, with a reluctance to learn the ins and outs of it. That'll dramatically lower the chances of them trying to be smart with SQL.

Eventually for certain queries you will have to get clever and write queries to optimize. Additionally to serve certain architectures you have to know a lot about the inner workings of the database and how to manipulate the api to get the performance needed at the lower level. An expert has no trouble with this and is an asset. This isn't about getting clever or doing tricky things with syntax just to be clever... this is about inevitability of the fact that a client will want to ask a question to a database that has grown so complex it is not straightforward to answer his question in a performant way. This is extremely common even for your run of the mill web app company.

But that's besides the point. I'm comparing haskell to SQL because it's a similar learning curve. Both are expression based languages. In fact I would argue that Haskell is EASIER then SQL due to the type checking.

Learn the language if you really want to understand our perspective. I use to be in that camp of why learn a freaking language when it's barely used, but that changed once I learned haskell.

[gridlockd]

> Then what is the big deal.

There is no "big deal". You're taking my facetious use of the word "wizard" the wrong way.

> Same with almost every other language that isn't popular yet. Rust and golang and kotlin and swift all went through this.

If Haskell already was popular, it would be an entirely different argument. Then we can talk about the merits of the language/platform versus the alternatives. Right now you're trying to sell me this exotic language used by exotic programmers who have strong opinions on design. From a business point of view, those are alarm bells. That's what you need to at least recognize, even though you disagree.

> Learning Haskell is just slightly more challenging and not a huge drain on productivity. Spend a couple more months training new developers in exchange for a 90% reduction in bugs and much better design.

This is what you believe and take for granted in your argument. I'm sure you're sincere about that, but remember, I'm not buying all those beliefs wholesale. Haskell has been around for thirty years, if it really makes for such vast increases in its productivity, why aren't those Haskell programmers dominating software development?

> This just tells me you're someone with little experience.

At least consider the possibility that there's some insight there that you don't quite grasp yet.

> Learn the language if you really want to understand our perspective.

"Buy the product in order to see why it's so great!" would be a terrible sales pitch, if you catch my drift.

[crimsonalucard]

>There is no "big deal". You're taking my facetious use of the word "wizard" the wrong way

And your taking my statement the wrong way. If there really is no big deal then there is really no big deal in me telling you and you actually learning it.

>If Haskell already was popular, it would be an entirely different argument.

If we are here to debate about popularity, then you win buddy. Haskell is not popular. That much is obvious. Every language starts somewhere and I'm here to promote why it should be popular. If you can't buy into that then well there's no point in talking. I get your point. Haskell is exotic and niche. But this is already stupendously obvious so why bring it up. If you don't want to use it for popularity reasons that's a valid point. But that does not discount the technical merits that lend positive credence to why you should use it. 90 percent less bugs then JavaScript is a technical feature that has profound impact on business as does 90 percent less developers.

> if it really makes for such vast increases in its productivity, why aren't those Haskell programmers dominating software development?

JavaScript was a language designed in a week and is largely universally considered to be a terrible language. Why does it dominate the software ecosystem? Because of circumstance and ease of adoption, that's it. Adoption rate isn't an accurate metric on productivity of a language. In fact these studies on productivity have been done before. The language that won was smalltalk.

>At least consider the possibility that there's some insight there that you don't quite grasp yet.

Why don't you tell me what your thinking rather then ask me to consider something that exists only in your mind.

>"Buy the product in order to see why it's so great!" would be a terrible sales pitch, if you catch my drift.

I do catch your drift. And you're right. Unfortunately my arguments don't seem to away you... If arguments don't away you than trying it is logically the only way left. But guess what free trial! Life time access. If you don't like it or if you like it, it's still yours, free!

[crimsonalucard]

Also, I want to say that I edited my convo to take out the fact that I thought your statement showed inexperience but you still ended up seeing it. That’s my fault and I apologize. I don’t know how much experience you have but that’s not a fair judgement to make or a civil thing to say to someone. It’s also unrelated to the topic at hand, so a faux pa on my part.