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> As a company in the lucky position of hiring for a Haskell role you have a pool of people who have self selected to be above average in determination and smar

> As a company in the lucky position of hiring for a Haskell role you have a pool of people who have self selected to be above average in determination and smarts [citation needed] There's really no evidence that people choosing Haskell are any smarter or more determined than anybody else. I'm mainly pointing this out because the Haskell community's "We're smarter than everybody" attitude is a big pet peeve of mine.

zeta0134 10y ago
I agree with your critique about the community attitude, so I sympathize with your position. However, speaking as a non-Haskell learner with a Haskell writing friend, I don't think it's fair to dismiss the notion entirely. Haskell is pure functional programming, and it's structure actively discourages a lot of the more common practices in iterative languages. I watched my friend struggle with a very simple web project for weeks while he was learning the language. At the end of it all though, when it finally came together and worked for the first time, he was confident about its behavior in a way I'm not sure I ever could be with the code I write regularly. (I'm a game programmer, so I write a lot of C++ and dabble in Python and Lua.) I think there's something to be said for the journey that Haskell necessarily takes you on. I don't think the upper skill ceiling for good Haskell developers is any higher than other languages, but the barrier for entry certainly seems to be.
- tome 10y ago
  > I agree with your critique about the community attitude Please link to concrete examples of this. I'm genuinely interested in calling people out on such rudeness. The Haskell community has traditionally been modest and very welcoming and I'd like to keep it that way.
  - Retra 10y ago
    I've heard this before too, and I think a big part of it comes from the fact that people writing on Haskell aren't afraid to use mathematical terminology, and that comes off a snooty to most.
sbov 10y ago
I think the point is that learning Haskell takes time and effort outside of standardized courses, so people who learn it are, as a percent of the population that knows the language, more determined than those who use more mainstream languages. As a simple example, even dropouts probably know Java.
- jlarocco 10y ago
  That argument doesn't work because learning any programming language well takes time and effort.
egl2016 10y ago
"more determined" -- you've obviously never dealt with Haskell tooling. :-)
tikhonj 10y ago
Haskell is non-standard and significantly different from everything else. Even if you ignore subjective qualities of the language, it takes some amount of initiative and self-selection to pick Haskell up at all, while lots of people are funneled into languages like Java, JavaScript, C#, Python by default. For example, relatively few universities (and presumably no bootcamps!) teach it at all, while it's hard to avoid programs that strongly feature Java and Python. More generally, it makes sense for the sort of people who make non-mainstream choices to be qualitatively different from many who do go with the mainstream.
dasil003 10y ago
I understand your pet peeve, really I do, but if you look at the contrapositive statement I think you will find it hard to argue: People who are just looking to get into software engineering for the money are unlikely to learn Haskell. They will almost certainly learn Java, PHP, Ruby, Node or maybe even Go, but not Haskell. And looking around SV these days, there is a huge number of people around that are only in it for the money. Not that that is a panacea... my instinct is you might end up with a very strong technical team, but one that might be more likely to miss the forest for the trees when it comes to building a successful business.
- jlarocco 10y ago
  > They will almost certainly learn Java, PHP, Ruby, Node or maybe even Go, but not Haskell. And looking around SV these days, there is a huge number of people around that are only in it for the money. I think you're confusing orthogonal issues. Only writing code because it pays the bills really says nothing about how smart or motivated a person is. Is there a rule somewhere that dumb people can't enjoy programming and learn Haskell? On the other hand I know a few very smart people who only write code because it pays their bills.
  - tome 10y ago
    > Is there a rule somewhere that dumb people can't enjoy programming and learn Haskell? No, there's no such rule. Can you possibly imagine that there might be any factors at play that affect the observed intelligence of Haskell programmers besides "a rule"?
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > Only writing code because it pays the bills really says nothing about how smart or motivated a person is. No, but actually bothering to learn something that isn't what is being shoveled through most major outlets is at least somewhat correlated with motivation.
    - jlarocco 10y ago
      After further thought, it seems like having a reputation as difficult to hire for and a reputation for attracting smart people would be two very good reasons for people "only in it for money" to learn Haskell.
dave2000 10y ago
You've never worked with..uh... cheaper developers who've been on a course and need everything explained 4 times and have no common sense and sniff a lot but who claim to be great Java/c#/JavaScript developers? Happens all the time. I'm guessing it's harder to bullshit the sort of person who handles hiring Haskell developers. Plus, someone who's studying Haskell probably is smarter on average than the average developer (and no, I'm not a Haskell developer although it interests me)
tome 10y ago
> Haskell community's "We're smarter than everybody" attitude Please link to concrete examples of this. I'm genuinely interested in calling people out on such rudeness. The Haskell community has traditionally been modest and very welcoming and I'd like to keep it that way.
- jlarocco 10y ago
  The comment I replied to is an example of this.
  - tome 10y ago
    Huh? "self selected to be above average in determination and smarts" is a far cry from "We're smarter than everybody else".
    - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
      Well, "self selected to be above average in determination and smarts" has to at least mean "we average smarter than everyone else", doesn't it?
      - tome 10y ago
        "Smarter than average" and "smarter than everyone else" are not synonyms.
        AnimalMuppet 10y ago
        True, but... jlarocco said two things: "There's really no evidence that people choosing Haskell are any smarter or more determined than anybody else" and "I'm mainly pointing this out because the Haskell community's "We're smarter than everybody" attitude is a big pet peeve of mine." Note the phrases "smarter than everybody" and "not smarter than anybody else". Those are not nuanced statements, but I don't think they're intended to be absolutely exclusive statements. Or to put it another way, if you interpret "smarter than everybody" as the claim that Haskell programmers are actually the smartest programmers, then grammatically, you also have to read "not smarter than anybody else" as the claim that Haskell programmers are as dumb as the dumbest programmers in existence - which I'm pretty sure was not jlarocco's actual claim.

zeta0134 10y ago

I agree with your critique about the community attitude, so I sympathize with your position. However, speaking as a non-Haskell learner with a Haskell writing friend, I don't think it's fair to dismiss the notion entirely. Haskell is pure functional programming, and it's structure actively discourages a lot of the more common practices in iterative languages. I watched my friend struggle with a very simple web project for weeks while he was learning the language. At the end of it all though, when it finally came together and worked for the first time, he was confident about its behavior in a way I'm not sure I ever could be with the code I write regularly. (I'm a game programmer, so I write a lot of C++ and dabble in Python and Lua.) I think there's something to be said for the journey that Haskell necessarily takes you on. I don't think the upper skill ceiling for good Haskell developers is any higher than other languages, but the barrier for entry certainly seems to be.

tome 10y ago
> I agree with your critique about the community attitude Please link to concrete examples of this. I'm genuinely interested in calling people out on such rudeness. The Haskell community has traditionally been modest and very welcoming and I'd like to keep it that way.
- Retra 10y ago
  I've heard this before too, and I think a big part of it comes from the fact that people writing on Haskell aren't afraid to use mathematical terminology, and that comes off a snooty to most.

sbov 10y ago

I think the point is that learning Haskell takes time and effort outside of standardized courses, so people who learn it are, as a percent of the population that knows the language, more determined than those who use more mainstream languages. As a simple example, even dropouts probably know Java.

jlarocco 10y ago
That argument doesn't work because learning any programming language well takes time and effort.

egl2016 10y ago

"more determined" -- you've obviously never dealt with Haskell tooling. :-)

tikhonj 10y ago

Haskell is non-standard and significantly different from everything else. Even if you ignore subjective qualities of the language, it takes some amount of initiative and self-selection to pick Haskell up at all, while lots of people are funneled into languages like Java, JavaScript, C#, Python by default. For example, relatively few universities (and presumably no bootcamps!) teach it at all, while it's hard to avoid programs that strongly feature Java and Python. More generally, it makes sense for the sort of people who make non-mainstream choices to be qualitatively different from many who do go with the mainstream.

dasil003 10y ago

I understand your pet peeve, really I do, but if you look at the contrapositive statement I think you will find it hard to argue: People who are just looking to get into software engineering for the money are unlikely to learn Haskell. They will almost certainly learn Java, PHP, Ruby, Node or maybe even Go, but not Haskell. And looking around SV these days, there is a huge number of people around that are only in it for the money. Not that that is a panacea... my instinct is you might end up with a very strong technical team, but one that might be more likely to miss the forest for the trees when it comes to building a successful business.

jlarocco 10y ago
> They will almost certainly learn Java, PHP, Ruby, Node or maybe even Go, but not Haskell. And looking around SV these days, there is a huge number of people around that are only in it for the money. I think you're confusing orthogonal issues. Only writing code because it pays the bills really says nothing about how smart or motivated a person is. Is there a rule somewhere that dumb people can't enjoy programming and learn Haskell? On the other hand I know a few very smart people who only write code because it pays their bills.
- tome 10y ago
  > Is there a rule somewhere that dumb people can't enjoy programming and learn Haskell? No, there's no such rule. Can you possibly imagine that there might be any factors at play that affect the observed intelligence of Haskell programmers besides "a rule"?
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Only writing code because it pays the bills really says nothing about how smart or motivated a person is. No, but actually bothering to learn something that isn't what is being shoveled through most major outlets is at least somewhat correlated with motivation.
  - jlarocco 10y ago
    After further thought, it seems like having a reputation as difficult to hire for and a reputation for attracting smart people would be two very good reasons for people "only in it for money" to learn Haskell.

dave2000 10y ago

You've never worked with..uh... cheaper developers who've been on a course and need everything explained 4 times and have no common sense and sniff a lot but who claim to be great Java/c#/JavaScript developers? Happens all the time. I'm guessing it's harder to bullshit the sort of person who handles hiring Haskell developers. Plus, someone who's studying Haskell probably is smarter on average than the average developer (and no, I'm not a Haskell developer although it interests me)

tome 10y ago

> Haskell community's "We're smarter than everybody" attitude Please link to concrete examples of this. I'm genuinely interested in calling people out on such rudeness. The Haskell community has traditionally been modest and very welcoming and I'd like to keep it that way.

jlarocco 10y ago
The comment I replied to is an example of this.
- tome 10y ago
  Huh? "self selected to be above average in determination and smarts" is a far cry from "We're smarter than everybody else".
  - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
    Well, "self selected to be above average in determination and smarts" has to at least mean "we average smarter than everyone else", doesn't it?
    - tome 10y ago
      "Smarter than average" and "smarter than everyone else" are not synonyms.
      - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
        True, but... jlarocco said two things: "There's really no evidence that people choosing Haskell are any smarter or more determined than anybody else" and "I'm mainly pointing this out because the Haskell community's "We're smarter than everybody" attitude is a big pet peeve of mine." Note the phrases "smarter than everybody" and "not smarter than anybody else". Those are not nuanced statements, but I don't think they're intended to be absolutely exclusive statements. Or to put it another way, if you interpret "smarter than everybody" as the claim that Haskell programmers are actually the smartest programmers, then grammatically, you also have to read "not smarter than anybody else" as the claim that Haskell programmers are as dumb as the dumbest programmers in existence - which I'm pretty sure was not jlarocco's actual claim.