3 ms·

They have misunderstood the Haskell motto, it's "avoid (success at all costs)" not "avoid success (at all costs)".

• dllthomas 10y ago
  I've always understood it to be literally the former, but at the same time tongue-in-cheek the latter.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• vilhelm_s 10y ago
  I don't think so? The longer explanation is > Haskell has a sort of unofficial slogan: avoid success at all costs. I think I mentioned this at a talk I gave about Haskell a few years back and it’s become sort of a little saying. When you become too well known, or too widely used and too successful (and certainly being adopted by Microsoft means such a thing), suddenly you can’t change anything anymore. You get caught and spend ages talking about things that have nothing to do with the research side of things. I’m primarily a programming language researcher, so the fact that Haskell has up to now been used for just university types has been ideal. Now it’s used a lot in industry but typically by people who are generally flexible, and they are a generally a self selected rather bright group. What that means is that we could change the language and they wouldn’t complain. Now, however, they’re starting to complain if their libraries don’t work, which means that we’re beginning to get caught in the trap of being too successful.
  • paulddraper 10y ago
    > Now, however, they’re starting to complain if their libraries don’t work, which means that we’re beginning to get caught in the trap of being too successful. Seems like the latter interpretation, not the former.