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> "Avoid success at all costs." > I mentioned this at a talk I gave about Haskell a few years back and it’s become quite widely quoted. When a language becomes
by Y_Y 8y ago
> "Avoid success at all costs."
> I mentioned this at a talk I gave about Haskell a few years back and it’s become quite widely quoted. When a language becomes too well known, or too widely used and too successful 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. Success is great, but it comes at a price. -- Simon Peyton Jones
There's not much in the way of marketing for Haskell. There isn't any drive to make it super-simple like Python, or super businessy like C#. It's fast if you make it so, but it's never going to be as fast as C. The cognitive defects required to like it are far less prevalent than those of JS-lovers. It's not built for the mainstream, even though it'll happily run GUIs and games and webpages and chat servers and whatever else is cool.
Even if it wanted to, taking over the world takes a lot of effort and luck. And it doesn't want to, and spends its effort and luck elsewhere.
- pitaj 8y agoDid you just call JS-lovers and Haskell-lovers cognitively defective?
- kbenson 8y agoI read it as more of an assertion that loving any language requires cognitive defects, some a bit more than others.
- Smaug123 8y agoIt's not an uncommon meme that programmers and mathematicians possess a weird twist in the mind that allows them [in the strong form of the meme] to do, and [in the weak form of the meme] to enjoy doing, what they do. If you grant that, then it's a small step to admitting the existence of different sub-twists that incline you towards different parts of the abstract space. If you don't grant that, then consider it a rhetorical device for pointing out that comparatively few people like Haskell versus JS.
- pitaj 8y agoWhy the word "defect" though? There must be other words that are less controversial. Maybe "abnormalities" or "specialities"?
- Y_Y 8y agoBut defects are what make diamonds have colours![0] I hope you didn't interpret that phrase as an attack. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystallographic_defects_in_diamond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystallographic_defects_in_di...
- lgas 8y ago"Interests"? "Appreciations"? "Proclivities"? "Personalities"?
- greenhatman 8y agoBecause less controversial words would be less funny.
- tabtab 8y agoHow about "possess an outlier brain design" among the human or even general IT population.
- AlexCoventry 8y agoWhat are the cognitive defects associated with liking Haskell? I'm always happy to learn more about my cognitive limitations.