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I didn't take it as that. I think his argument translates to other functional languages to some degree. I was working on a Scala project where the lead develo

I didn't take it as that. I think his argument translates to other functional languages to some degree. I was working on a Scala project where the lead developer exhibited the exact behavior the author describes. Scala is a bit more "useful" than Haskell because it borrows from Java, and it's not too much of a leap to write something you can use. Opening a file in Scala and processing it is much less of an understanding task than it is in Haskell. The "understand first, then use" aspect of many functional languages is what kills systems in the crib when you're trying to build something that provides business value.

sidlls 9y ago
> The "understand first, then use" aspect of many functional languages is what kills systems in the crib when you're trying to build something that provides business value. This notion that one must "understand first, then use" is limited strictly to the particulars of the language. It's equally true of other languages: one must understand at some level how the language works to build anything with it. It also isn't clear how having to understand Haskell and having to "understand thing" are the same thing, as the author asserts. An uncharitable reading of the article is that it's a sophomoric insult to people who don't use Haskell, as it apparently dismisses them all as people who don't care to understand things but only to more or less mindlessly and practically randomly build stuff. I surely hope that wasn't the intent.