[kccqzy]

Someone who learned Haskell intensely for 8 days could very well be more productive than someone who learned Haskell intensely for 80 days. The former probably got a good introduction to the standard library functions and has become familiar with the main classes like Functor, Applicative, Foldable, Traversable. The latter might be too engorged in advanced language features like TypeInType; or evaluating and choosing between slightly different abstractions to accomplish a single goal, like choosing van Laarhoven optics vs profunctor optics.

And I'm not trying to demean advanced type system extensions or van Laarhoven lenses; I'm just reflecting on my personal journey with Haskell. Playing around with the language in this way is similar to playing around with advanced template meta programming in C++. It just takes experience to have the discipline to know the difference and write simple code and be productive.

[mhitza]

Submitted report was published in 1994.

At the time I don't think Haskell had any of that, and not sure when monads were introduced in Haskell either (wasn't on day 1 I think). Which means that the language was simpler in some aspects.

But what I do think made the job simpler is that they had easy access to other people that knew Haskell. Whereas, today, unless you have a mentor you're going to need to handle any issues you're encountering via delayed responses on community forums... Or AI, most of the time.

[kccqzy]

Yeah I know the report was from 1994. But it doesn't make sense to learn and use Haskell as if it's still 1994 and so that's not my argument. If anything, having the article be a top link on HN might convince someone to learn Haskell today, and that's what's relevant.

Totally agree on having people nearby that knew Haskell already.