3 ms·

I'm not necessarily arguing in favor of a team being spontaneously switched to Haskell (any big move like that seems ill-advised in general), but I do find this

• lmm 8y ago
  > You're suggesting that you'll only learn something if there's a smooth, continuous path to its mastery from what you already know. That basically leaves you stuck in whatever connected component of programming expertise you're already in, incapable of making a big jump anywhere else. Indeed it does, but I think it's the right choice. How many times can you afford to "not be productive for months" for the sake of learning some new paradigm that promises the world - and how many actually deliver on what their advocates claim? There are dozens or hundreds out there, and while I now know from experience that the advantages of Haskell-style functional programming are real, a priori there was no way to distinguish it from all the oversold-but-useless approaches that are out there. Indeed my experience is that whether you can do it incrementally is actually quite a good signal for whether there's real value in a paradigm, or it's a load of hot air.