[yodsanklai]

yes, it looks all good, until you want to change it. For instance, to make the file name a CLI parameter, you need to understand things like type classes, specifically Monad, Functor and Applicative. You may need a long time to be at ease with these things and a superficial understanding will not take you very far. In Python, it'll take you a few minutes to do the same thing.

[cess11]

What do you mean by "long time"? Why wouldn't it apply just the same to some Python file that defines a Maybe with a bit of unwrap and bind and orElse or whatever?

Instead of things going boom and spewing a stack sometimes they just go Nothing instead, you don't need much more understanding than that. There is a lot of syntax in Haskell that is somewhat hard to understand at first but you don't actually need it to write stuff yourself.

This idea that you need to talk a particular way and be able to teach CS theory at uni and whatnot to build stuff in Haskell is probably not very healthy.

[yodsanklai]

Long time, I mean possibly several weeks of full-time studying for an intermediate Python or C++ programmer.

I'm not saying you need any CS theory to write Haskell or that it's super hard. But I think the learning curve is pretty steep, and it's hard to write code without a good understanding of the concepts. Just tweaking until it type checks isn't going to cut it.

Consider this code. Generated from ChatGPT. This is supposed to be a simple command line option parsing. I don't think it's obvious what all the operators mean.

Sure, you can try to reuse this, and extend it. But I think sooner than later you'll be stuck with some undecipherable error messages and you'll have to sit down and understand what it all means.

  data Options = Options
    { optVerbose :: Bool
    , optInput   :: String
    } deriving Show

  optionsParser :: Parser Options
  optionsParser = Options
    <$> switch
        ( long "verbose"
       <> short 'v'
       <> help "Enable verbose mode" )
    <\*> strOption
        ( long "input"
       <> short 'i'
       <> metavar "FILENAME"
       <> help "Input file name" )

[7thaccount]

This is a really good point. I have coworkers that don't really code, but can use ChatGPT to help them put together a Python app that does what they need with some common sense changes. I don't think I could even do the same with Haskell with a fair amount of coding experience+ reading up a lot on Haskell over the years. It may be obvious to those select few who are drawn to Haskell, but I think they greatly underestimate the challenges for the average person. That's the essence of what I've been saying to the parent thread that believes a subset of Haskell will become popular some day. I could be wrong, but just can't see it.

[instig007]

It is obvious, as long as you know what Functors and Semigroups for custom data types are. If you don't know it, you can still use it freely without fully understanding the meaning of `<>` and `<$>`, because they are written almost as plain bullet points of components to treat as a single whole.