[JoelMcCracken]

> now do you Depends. I like JS ok. I really like Lisps. I miss doing Ruby sometimes. I've been doing more Python lately and find it rather distasteful, all this tooling is just so so complicated for very dubious guarantees/benefit. Not all of us are a sum of tropes.

The main thing that I find frustrating is that the actual act of programming in an impure language is so much harder. Haskell is def harder to learn, like 10x at least imo. Especially for a mainstream dev. But, once you know it, there is a simplicity to what you're doing which is very easy to do. I find myself having to just think so hard when writing python. "what exacty does this function do? Oh it calls this other function, I have to go check that one." etc. And then with a myriad of control flow issues, and random syntactic "sugar" to contend with...

There are a number of haskell companies, not just Jane street, and they do pretty well. If you don't follow the space closely, it is not surprising that you don't know about it. But there are. Not nearly as many as Python or whatever, but the appeal to the popular is def problematic: mostly because, at one point python itself was a radical new thing, full of skeptics like "if its so great, why don't more people use it".

Many ideas from haskell/typed fp are slowly making their way out into the larger community. Witness Swift, Kotlin, Java, numerous features in C#, etc. People like them.

Its fine if you don't like Haskell and don't want to use it. But its not an insane choice.

Haskell community really needs to do better at making it easier to get started though. Eventually I hope to contribute to that.

[taylodl]

You remind me that it's not the language that people use per se, it's the frameworks. Python has been around for 30 years. It was NumPy and SciPy that propelled it to the phenomenon we know today. Likewise with Ruby. I remember when Ruby was released in the mid 90's and wondering why would anyone use this language? Ten years later the Rails framework appeared and suddenly Ruby was a language that went mainstream.

Honest question - does Haskell have such a compelling framework driving its adoption? Or does Haskell suffer the "curse of Lisp" and people just create whatever they need when they need it and no big framework ever gets developed that drives adoption?

[JoelMcCracken]

> compelling framework

Sadly no. There are contenders for this that have arisen over the years, but we don’t have a RoR for Haskell yet.

If you’re curious, here is a talk that goes into this problem. It’s very accessible IMO. https://youtu.be/fNpsgTIpODA

To be honest, the compelling reason to learn Haskell for me was so I could engage with various academic literature. I just kept running into things I didn’t understand which were tangential to the topic of the paper, and it seemed like the most straightforward way to solve this was to start with learning Haskell. Once I learned it, I realized I was wrong in my biases, and Haskell is a fantastic tool for normal programming, with some important caveats.

[akhmatova]

But then it actually does get back to the language because the reason people build NumPy and SciPy (and Django and tons of stuff in other domains) is that Python is, after all (despite its warts) so damn easy to use. Making it easier to build all that stuff, and more rewarding also (because there's an audience).

Which is not an extra but in fact means a heck of a lot for a language's chance at long-term acceptance.

[JoelMcCracken]

Yep, this is absolutely a problem. Beginner-friendliness is huge, and we need to keep working on it.