[Daishiman]

What killed Haskell is its obsession with monad-as-burrito tutorials that had nothing to do with getting anything useful done, as well as considering writing a PDF in Latex as an acceptable substitute for a blog post or documentation.

Nothing in Haskell was sufficiently interesting to justify overcoming the conceptual barriers and different culture.

[rainsil]

The issue with monad tutorials is that they start at the top - trying to impart a generalizable understanding of the concept (which, short of category-theoretic explanations, requires hopelessly leaky analogies) instead of focusing on the purpose and usage of specific monads.[1][2] Abstract concepts must be first made concrete in order to understand them; in the case of monads, it's best to just look at the type signature for specific monads' "bind" (>>=) functions, as well as examples of usage, while actually using them in (permissively typed) code, rather than trying to connect burrito analogies to real life.

[1]:http://dev.stephendiehl.com/hask/#eightfold-path-to-monad-sa...

[2]:Regular expression tutorials, by contrast, virtually never attempt to explain regular languages or automata theory, which is why nobody complains about having to learn formal language theory in order to use `sed`.

A surprisingly digestible (and concrete) explaination of monads (Ch 2): http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~rjmh/Papers/arrows.pdf

[raverbashing]

This

They always go for the mathematical way of explaining stuff (this is not a compliment). Programmer English please, not Alien Math. (And that's me saying as someone who likes Alien math in general. But I just don't see the point in using it when programming).

Ok cool, your programming language now has two worlds, the functional world and the imperative world and they have two different syntaxes and you have to pass your world as an extra parameter and etc etc

And I personally find the syntactic sugar built on top of it confuses more than helps (ok, some of it is just Haskell being Haskell, but it confuses)

[x86_64Ubuntu]

Speaking of alien math. I always thought Haskell looked like the countdown sequence in Predator when the Predator sets the self-destruct sequence. It was very off-putting and scary when I first saw it.

https://youtu.be/l2qZZQxMfmc?t=26

[viro]

Here is an another reason it failed... I have a CS degree and I barely understand what was said here. just being honest... maybe I just need more coffee.

[alexbanks]

Purely anecdotally, I've found haskell-centric spaces to be pretty hostile, which definitely did not help getting me interested.

[tome]

Interesting. Would you mind expanding your anecdote, explaining which spaces and what you found hostile? Knowing that would help me understand how to improve the community. Thanks.

[alexbanks]

/r/programming, /r/haskell, this site, interactions with real people at Haskell meetups and normal programming meetups.

[codygman]

I'm very sorry for your bad experiences.

If you are comfortable giving some examples of that bad behavior and what it looked like I'd be happy to watch out for it and call anyone on that bad behavior so others don't have to experience it.

[alexbanks]

I just noticed this comment. I appreciate your and tome's obvious concern for the community you're a part of, and I hope very much that you both continue to enjoy it and thrive. I mean you no ill-will and wish you best of luck.