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I'm not sure that holds up. Real people working at real companies are writing real code in Haskell every day. I found several job postings in London that advert

I'm not sure that holds up. Real people working at real companies are writing real code in Haskell every day. I found several job postings in London that advertised Haskell as a requirement / nice to have. Haskell is also taught and used extensively at my alma matter, and is in fact the first language you will be introduced to at a CS/SE degree. How is that in any way, shape, or form comparable to Brainfuck?!

javajosh 7y ago
When was the last time you installed and/or ran a Haskell program? If the answer is more recent then "never", then what was it? It's possible that Haskell is like COBOL in that it's used in industry but not at all by the community. But I'm not sure how I would characterize it, then. Does industry use count as "practical"? I honestly don't know. Anyway, examples would be nice.
- bigDinosaur 7y ago
  I installed and used Pandoc the other week, and you've likely used it without knowing it (e.g. via web backends) if you don't use it directly. I also use it for Elm (i.e. the Elm compiler) almost every day.
- chii 7y ago
  And what is "the community"? Haskell indeed has less penetration than something more popular like JavaScript. But the Haskell language is not easy to use if you're a script-kiddy. Most "easy" languages can have some form of copy-paste reuse, and a lot of "the community", it would seem, just append together useful snippets to get their programs done (and whether they have a deep understanding or not is not needed). This isn't true for Haskell. It's actually quite hard to just "copy/paste" Haskell without out knowing the underlying concepts. I wager that the reason there seems to be less.of a community in Haskell is due to this property.
  - Hercuros 7y ago
    I think it is a bit of an oversimplification to say that Haskell is less popular because it is not as easy to "copy/paste" together code for it. I would say it also isn't that easy to copy/paste together C++ code, for instance. This also conveys a message of "Haskell is only for smart people", which I don't think is the right attitude.

javajosh 7y ago

When was the last time you installed and/or ran a Haskell program? If the answer is more recent then "never", then what was it? It's possible that Haskell is like COBOL in that it's used in industry but not at all by the community. But I'm not sure how I would characterize it, then. Does industry use count as "practical"? I honestly don't know. Anyway, examples would be nice.

bigDinosaur 7y ago
I installed and used Pandoc the other week, and you've likely used it without knowing it (e.g. via web backends) if you don't use it directly. I also use it for Elm (i.e. the Elm compiler) almost every day.
chii 7y ago
And what is "the community"? Haskell indeed has less penetration than something more popular like JavaScript. But the Haskell language is not easy to use if you're a script-kiddy. Most "easy" languages can have some form of copy-paste reuse, and a lot of "the community", it would seem, just append together useful snippets to get their programs done (and whether they have a deep understanding or not is not needed). This isn't true for Haskell. It's actually quite hard to just "copy/paste" Haskell without out knowing the underlying concepts. I wager that the reason there seems to be less.of a community in Haskell is due to this property.
- Hercuros 7y ago
  I think it is a bit of an oversimplification to say that Haskell is less popular because it is not as easy to "copy/paste" together code for it. I would say it also isn't that easy to copy/paste together C++ code, for instance. This also conveys a message of "Haskell is only for smart people", which I don't think is the right attitude.