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Your point can be generalized to support any local optimum. Come on. "It seems equally plausible that people wouldn't spend time hearing your argument because t

Your point can be generalized to support any local optimum. Come on. "It seems equally plausible that people wouldn't spend time hearing your argument because they don't like it". Still, this is a bit harsh to return your argument like this, because you're striking a good point: getting to know a language and its "philosophy of use" takes time. However, i do not see why not having taken the energy to climb out of your comfort zone to reach what is considered a better optimum by those who have would give any more weight, by comparison to the alternatives, to your opinion. Edit: I have never used Haskell, but if I had to chose a next language to learn this would probably be it. Simply because people who use it speak of it as a kind revelation by comparison to the the way they used to program in their previous language. Also since I have worked for quite some time with the dynamic alternative in FP (Clojure) I might well try its static variant with Haskell. However as you pointed out, I'm not learning it because of lack of time/focus. Still that does not prevent me from listening closely to what Haskellers have to say, or say people from Common Lisp or even people attached to the JVM and its language ecosystem. Why ? because their experience is valuable. It's not just theirs, and it could way have been mine.

throwawaymath 8y ago
My point can be generalized, sure. But you haven't substantiated the idea that most people who try both Java and Haskell/Lisp will prefer Haskell/Lisp. That's precisely why my very general point is applicable - your claim is sufficiently unsupported that I can simply reverse the hypothesis and we have no more or less information than we started with. If you'd like, I can trade anecdotes instead - I used to work at a company with a large codebase consisting of nontrivial Java, Clojure, Scala and Haskell. Nearly every engineer I spoke to preferred Java (and I had to interact with nearly all the 300 engineers who worked on it). Now at this point it may seem like I'm being a curmudgeon. But the reason I'm harping on this is because your implicit claim is that Haskell/Lisp are better languages for either productive or aesthetic reasons. But I don't think that's a fair statement - they're different languages, suited to different tasks. You shouldn't draw the conclusion that people who have e.g. moved on to Haskell from Java are representative of most Java developers. It's equally plausible that most Java programmers don't want to move on from Java, and so wouldn't like Haskell if they've tried it. Or perhaps they have tried it and simply didn't jive with it.
- willtim 8y ago
  > they're different languages, suited to different tasks. What tasks exactly do you think Java is better suited to than Haskell? The "innovation" of Java was to take the runtime of a high-level language and combine it with the productivity of a low-level one. It is not well particularly suited to systems programming or high-level programming (e.g. ML and analytics, parallelism, concurrency).
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throwawaymath 8y ago

My point can be generalized, sure. But you haven't substantiated the idea that most people who try both Java and Haskell/Lisp will prefer Haskell/Lisp. That's precisely why my very general point is applicable - your claim is sufficiently unsupported that I can simply reverse the hypothesis and we have no more or less information than we started with. If you'd like, I can trade anecdotes instead - I used to work at a company with a large codebase consisting of nontrivial Java, Clojure, Scala and Haskell. Nearly every engineer I spoke to preferred Java (and I had to interact with nearly all the 300 engineers who worked on it). Now at this point it may seem like I'm being a curmudgeon. But the reason I'm harping on this is because your implicit claim is that Haskell/Lisp are better languages for either productive or aesthetic reasons. But I don't think that's a fair statement - they're different languages, suited to different tasks. You shouldn't draw the conclusion that people who have e.g. moved on to Haskell from Java are representative of most Java developers. It's equally plausible that most Java programmers don't want to move on from Java, and so wouldn't like Haskell if they've tried it. Or perhaps they have tried it and simply didn't jive with it.

willtim 8y ago
> they're different languages, suited to different tasks. What tasks exactly do you think Java is better suited to than Haskell? The "innovation" of Java was to take the runtime of a high-level language and combine it with the productivity of a low-level one. It is not well particularly suited to systems programming or high-level programming (e.g. ML and analytics, parallelism, concurrency).

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