3 ms·

30 developers is either sad, or really sad. Unfortunately, if software is going to wind up restricted to specialized druids adhering to Haskell, I'm not sure th

30 developers is either sad, or really sad. Unfortunately, if software is going to wind up restricted to specialized druids adhering to Haskell, I'm not sure that is a good thing

tome 9y ago
Why would it be sad? There are 30 Haskell developers at SCB, 0 Ruby developers and probably 100s of Excel developers. I don't see why one of these facts should make you sad (or happy) and not the others.
- 59nadir 9y ago
  His point is obviously that they should hire more to make Haskell seem popular, even though one of the reasons they don't need more than 30 is because it's Haskell and not JavaScript.
  - throwaway7645 9y ago
    Or OP's point was the largest company using Haskell only employs 30 Haskell devs. A Haskell proponent will say exactly, you only need a few developers with Haskell, while someone suspicious will say if this tech were truly great more people would use it
    - przemo_li 9y ago
      Your comment make no sense what so ever. Number of haskellers in some particular company (despite your attempt at labeling it as "largest" without providing any evidence), do not prove or disprove quality of haskell. Number of developers implying perfection of language is also easily disproved. PHP or JS are good examples, where original languages become popular because of other factors. Also, original poster was trying to sell us single data point as measure of popularity O_O Getting good quantitative informations about languages is hard. But claiming that X devs hired in some company implies poor quality but X+10 would imply good quality is just ridiculous.
      - throwaway7645 9y ago
        I disagree. Vanilla Ice song, Titanic song (my heart will go on), and Hansen Mmmbop might make you cringe, but people went nuts over those songs for a reason. At the time they were amazing. Php might not be the world's greatest language, but at the time it had what people needed in the way they needed it (easy to build websites). Haskell may be objectively better than Php from a language design standpoint, but there is still a LOT that keeps your average Joe/Jane developer from really learning the language (which string library to use as the seemingly default one is really slow, bad IDE support, unpredictable performance due to laziness, monads...etc). You can tell me Haskell is great all day and on paper I would agree, but due to the simple fact that in reality nobody is using it in production or hiring for it (yes some outliers exist), that tells the average person all they need to know. Where is Haskell on tiobe (yes not a perfect source I'm aware, but good enough)? I don't think it even shows up in the top 50 languages. That means drastically reduced employability to many people. I'm definitely not bashing Haskell btw. I think it's great, but I could also understand a lot of people shying away for good reason.
willtim 9y ago
IMHO, sad is when you have large numbers of people hacking on a multi-million line codebase in Python with no static types, unfortunately a far more common situation in finance!
quickthrower2 9y ago
Druids? Anyone who can learn language X, Y or Z can learn Haskell. There is even a book written to make it easier to learn. I think what makes Haskell harder is that when you go to work, everyone is using Java, Python etc. Just like it is harder to learn Arabic than English if you live in an English speaking country. Not sure how this can be addressed, or if it needs to be.

30 developers is either sad, or really sad. Unfortunately, if software is going to wind up restricted to specialized druids adhering to Haskell, I'm not sure that is a good thing

tome 9y ago

Why would it be sad? There are 30 Haskell developers at SCB, 0 Ruby developers and probably 100s of Excel developers. I don't see why one of these facts should make you sad (or happy) and not the others.

59nadir 9y ago
His point is obviously that they should hire more to make Haskell seem popular, even though one of the reasons they don't need more than 30 is because it's Haskell and not JavaScript.
- throwaway7645 9y ago
  Or OP's point was the largest company using Haskell only employs 30 Haskell devs. A Haskell proponent will say exactly, you only need a few developers with Haskell, while someone suspicious will say if this tech were truly great more people would use it
  - przemo_li 9y ago
    Your comment make no sense what so ever. Number of haskellers in some particular company (despite your attempt at labeling it as "largest" without providing any evidence), do not prove or disprove quality of haskell. Number of developers implying perfection of language is also easily disproved. PHP or JS are good examples, where original languages become popular because of other factors. Also, original poster was trying to sell us single data point as measure of popularity O_O Getting good quantitative informations about languages is hard. But claiming that X devs hired in some company implies poor quality but X+10 would imply good quality is just ridiculous.
    - throwaway7645 9y ago
      I disagree. Vanilla Ice song, Titanic song (my heart will go on), and Hansen Mmmbop might make you cringe, but people went nuts over those songs for a reason. At the time they were amazing. Php might not be the world's greatest language, but at the time it had what people needed in the way they needed it (easy to build websites). Haskell may be objectively better than Php from a language design standpoint, but there is still a LOT that keeps your average Joe/Jane developer from really learning the language (which string library to use as the seemingly default one is really slow, bad IDE support, unpredictable performance due to laziness, monads...etc). You can tell me Haskell is great all day and on paper I would agree, but due to the simple fact that in reality nobody is using it in production or hiring for it (yes some outliers exist), that tells the average person all they need to know. Where is Haskell on tiobe (yes not a perfect source I'm aware, but good enough)? I don't think it even shows up in the top 50 languages. That means drastically reduced employability to many people. I'm definitely not bashing Haskell btw. I think it's great, but I could also understand a lot of people shying away for good reason.

willtim 9y ago

IMHO, sad is when you have large numbers of people hacking on a multi-million line codebase in Python with no static types, unfortunately a far more common situation in finance!

quickthrower2 9y ago

Druids? Anyone who can learn language X, Y or Z can learn Haskell. There is even a book written to make it easier to learn. I think what makes Haskell harder is that when you go to work, everyone is using Java, Python etc. Just like it is harder to learn Arabic than English if you live in an English speaking country. Not sure how this can be addressed, or if it needs to be.