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How difficult is it in your experience for developers to learn Haskell while on the job?

• chadaustin 10y ago
  In my experience at IMVU, surprisingly not very difficult. It's easier to learn Haskell in a team environment than on your own because your peers can help you connect the dots and accomplish your task at hand. It did seem like less experienced people picked it up faster, perhaps because they had less to unlearn. The hardest things were learning to parse GHC's error messages and learning all of the names of the functions to transform between various data types.
• evincarofautumn 10y ago
  I basically learned Haskell at my first job (writing a compiler), and it was pretty easy to productively contribute starting on day 1, especially because there seems to be less risk of breakage than in many other languages. I also helped teach it at the next job, and developers found it pretty easy to pick up, just different from what they were used to. Prior to this, I had some experience using it for hobby projects, but there was a lot more to learn for real-world use. My colleagues and I helped each other learn new concepts and write better code, as best we could, but we did end up making some questionable design decisions. I think you still need an experienced Haskeller to advise on good program architecture.
  • andrewchambers 10y ago
    Compilers are a bit easier to start with because you can just deal with pure functions for the majority of the time
    • evincarofautumn 10y ago
      You can, but that’s not to say we did, haha. One of the aforementioned questionable design decisions.