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Thank you. You demonstrate very well what the problem is with the Haskell community, and that in a topic about Haskell adoption. For a language to be adopted i

Thank you. You demonstrate very well what the problem is with the Haskell community, and that in a topic about Haskell adoption. For a language to be adopted it must be beginner friendly. And by beginner friendly, I don't mean easy. It can have a steep learning curve as long as it enables the user to be productive, otherwise the beginner will give up quickly. For the experienced user things like, "don't use lazy IO", "there are partial functions on the Prelude", "String is slow", and "code may throw exceptions where you don't expect", may be obvious, but are not for the beginner. I don't remember exactly how I ended up using "lazy IO", but trust me it wasn't because I ignored a big fat warning that I should NOT be using it. It's gotchas like these that prevent the beginner from being productive. Then the beginner reaches out to the community sharing his experience and gets a defensive and passive aggressive reply like yours. It's enough to make them not want to touch that language ever again. You think you are defending your favorite language, but actually you are doing more harm.

whateveracct 6y ago
haskell is a language for experts. quite frankly, it does not need runaway success to be successful. it can remain a top 20 or whatever language popularity-wise and remain best-in-class for experts. once you are the expert, you would waste your time to use other programming languages. also - the post you are replying to isn't condescending. the haskell community just doesn't treat beginners like infants who need coddling. haskellers tend to give the nuanced & truthful answer to questions.
- yladiz 6y ago
  > haskell is a language for experts. Expert in what? Programming? Lambda calculus? Category theory? Let’s not pretend that you are simply an expert in something randomly, it takes a lot of practice, mistakes, and actually being a beginner before being an expert. Even if you are an expert in the above you still are a beginner when learning Haskell the first time, and you will make mistakes, so having beginner friendly resources is important. Quite frankly, it’s this kind of gatekeeping attitude - that Haskell is meant for “us” and to become one of us, you have to be an expert, and we aren’t going to coddle you - is a kind of attitude that significantly contributes to the lack of good and welcoming beginner resources and causes very few people to actually pick up and stick with the language. You can be a “language for experts” and still have good, beginner friendly learning resources to welcome more into some community.
  - whateveracct 6y ago
    It's a language for experts in Haskell. It isn't optimized for the beginner, and all the proposed fixes to issues don't work due to that. We can't just remove lazy IO or partial head without significant impacts, so we coexist with them - tutorials and all. There are plenty of beginner-friendly resources already (more & more every year), but they can't erase worse ones from the Internet. The Haskell community lacks the sort of strong-fisted leadership to accomplish that by design. That said, acting like a tutorial mentioning lazy IO or partial head/tail is a killer is a little ridiculous. Neither of those things are atrociously problematic, so learning about them early is fine. You may get cut due to them, but getting cut is okay if you don't flip the table. Also I (and most of Haskell posters) do not gatekeep. The community will go well out of its way to respond to any questions beginners have with blog-post-quality comments in the various forums (mailing list, reddit, irc, slack, github issues, etc) There is definitely a teaching culture, which is the opposite of gatekeeping.
    - alisonkisk 6y ago
      Is it really so hard to add a flag -safe that rejects or warns on garbage like what's in Prelude (lazy IO, partial functions)?
      - whateveracct 6y ago
        Well kind of yes and no. As far as GHC is concerned, `Prelude` is just a module like any other, within `base`, a package like any other. We could special-case it, but on the other hand, there are already multiple other solutions in this space that are more generally useful. Alternate Preludes (and compiler support of -XNoImplicitPrelude) `hlint` can also be customized to do exactly what you're asking for as well.
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  > haskell is a language for experts That's going to make it very hard for me to run a business, which involves sourcing, hiring, and training a potentially large number of people. Hiring only experts is a tremendous business cost.
  - whateveracct 6y ago
    That's potentially true, and also fine. Success for a programming language doesn't mean it has to be a good language for a corporation's interests. Haskell is first and foremost a gigantic personal productivity booster. It allows me to do bigger and more complex projects on my own or with one or two others. These projects are not for corporate interests although that can be for personal profit. I am pretty confident I will be able to stop giving my labor to any corporation within the 10 year mark of my career, and Haskell will be a big reason why. But I still try to convince corporations to use Haskell since then we offload the cost of learning onto a corporation instead of an individual. That feels like a worthwhile re-allocation of capital to me! Corporate Haskellers get paid to gain expertise and keep it forever, leaving corporation with nothing besides their direct labor. Luckily it's easy to convince a corporation of anything with what amounts to propaganda & politics.
youerbt 6y ago
So you went from hearing some promises to discovering gotchas in complex, decades old technology, decided to stop and then school the haskell community on topics they are very well aware of. How very modest of you, if only they could listen.
- whateveracct 6y ago
  some people spout answers when they should be asking questions
marcosdumay 6y ago
Honestly, I'm not much concerned with beginner friendliness. As long as there are enough users to maintain and improve its ecosystem, it will stay a good language. The moto of "avoid success at all costs" was correct, and if beginner friendliness comes at the expense of expert usefulness, I'll be glad the second is chosen. That said, none of that applies to those gotchas. They are clear problems with the language. None of them are obvious, but all of them are widely discussed so you will see them early when learning the language. Learning the gotchas of an ecosystem is a central part of learning any tool on informatics, and as gotchas go, one of the strong points of Haskell is that there are very little of them. You are making a very common complaint, that comes from ignoring the problems of the tools you know while making a fuzz over anything you find on the new one. It's almost certain that whatever languages you are used to, they have a much larger pile of gotchas than Haskell (because Haskell has an atypical small number of them), but that doesn't stop them from being useful.
- _huayra_ 6y ago
  Another point is that beginner-friendly languages don't always make expert-friendly languages. Python is great for beginners, but I have seen its lack of types create heaps of brittle code at companies that no one wants to touch. Some of the "C++ contenders" (besides Rust) like Nim, Zig, and potentially Swift seem to balance this line well: simple to start using, but grow with one's expertise.
- bird_monster 6y ago
  > You are making a very common complaint, that comes from ignoring the problems of the tools you know while making a fuzz over anything you find on the new one. It's almost certain that whatever languages you are used to, they have a much larger pile of gotchas than Haskell (because Haskell has an atypical small number of them), but that doesn't stop them from being useful. "Yeah well your language isn't good either" isn't a very good argument for why a language is _better_. If the idea is "Haskell works better than other languages as long as you happen to know how to make it so", isn't that just every language that exists? Due to Haskell's branding, I was under the impression that the issues the above user is describing should be impossible. If Haskell doesn't even make good on those guarantees, but instead shifts that guarantee as "Things you should've known not to do" onto the user, how is that different from any other language? edit And since this thread has a lot of tension and vague hostility, I will add, I am not attacking you or the language you enjoy. I legitimately would like to better understand.
nightski 6y ago
I wrote quite a bit of Haskell several years ago and sadly I have to agree! I understand why all the cruft is kept around - for one backwards compatability. But they really need a clean break to remove all the cruft and simplify things. There shouldn't be so many ways to do things (especially if some of those ways are just flat out wrong).

whateveracct 6y ago

haskell is a language for experts. quite frankly, it does not need runaway success to be successful. it can remain a top 20 or whatever language popularity-wise and remain best-in-class for experts. once you are the expert, you would waste your time to use other programming languages. also - the post you are replying to isn't condescending. the haskell community just doesn't treat beginners like infants who need coddling. haskellers tend to give the nuanced & truthful answer to questions.

yladiz 6y ago
> haskell is a language for experts. Expert in what? Programming? Lambda calculus? Category theory? Let’s not pretend that you are simply an expert in something randomly, it takes a lot of practice, mistakes, and actually being a beginner before being an expert. Even if you are an expert in the above you still are a beginner when learning Haskell the first time, and you will make mistakes, so having beginner friendly resources is important. Quite frankly, it’s this kind of gatekeeping attitude - that Haskell is meant for “us” and to become one of us, you have to be an expert, and we aren’t going to coddle you - is a kind of attitude that significantly contributes to the lack of good and welcoming beginner resources and causes very few people to actually pick up and stick with the language. You can be a “language for experts” and still have good, beginner friendly learning resources to welcome more into some community.
- whateveracct 6y ago
  It's a language for experts in Haskell. It isn't optimized for the beginner, and all the proposed fixes to issues don't work due to that. We can't just remove lazy IO or partial head without significant impacts, so we coexist with them - tutorials and all. There are plenty of beginner-friendly resources already (more & more every year), but they can't erase worse ones from the Internet. The Haskell community lacks the sort of strong-fisted leadership to accomplish that by design. That said, acting like a tutorial mentioning lazy IO or partial head/tail is a killer is a little ridiculous. Neither of those things are atrociously problematic, so learning about them early is fine. You may get cut due to them, but getting cut is okay if you don't flip the table. Also I (and most of Haskell posters) do not gatekeep. The community will go well out of its way to respond to any questions beginners have with blog-post-quality comments in the various forums (mailing list, reddit, irc, slack, github issues, etc) There is definitely a teaching culture, which is the opposite of gatekeeping.
  - alisonkisk 6y ago
    Is it really so hard to add a flag -safe that rejects or warns on garbage like what's in Prelude (lazy IO, partial functions)?
    - whateveracct 6y ago
      Well kind of yes and no. As far as GHC is concerned, `Prelude` is just a module like any other, within `base`, a package like any other. We could special-case it, but on the other hand, there are already multiple other solutions in this space that are more generally useful. Alternate Preludes (and compiler support of -XNoImplicitPrelude) `hlint` can also be customized to do exactly what you're asking for as well.
UncleMeat 6y ago
> haskell is a language for experts That's going to make it very hard for me to run a business, which involves sourcing, hiring, and training a potentially large number of people. Hiring only experts is a tremendous business cost.
- whateveracct 6y ago
  That's potentially true, and also fine. Success for a programming language doesn't mean it has to be a good language for a corporation's interests. Haskell is first and foremost a gigantic personal productivity booster. It allows me to do bigger and more complex projects on my own or with one or two others. These projects are not for corporate interests although that can be for personal profit. I am pretty confident I will be able to stop giving my labor to any corporation within the 10 year mark of my career, and Haskell will be a big reason why. But I still try to convince corporations to use Haskell since then we offload the cost of learning onto a corporation instead of an individual. That feels like a worthwhile re-allocation of capital to me! Corporate Haskellers get paid to gain expertise and keep it forever, leaving corporation with nothing besides their direct labor. Luckily it's easy to convince a corporation of anything with what amounts to propaganda & politics.

youerbt 6y ago

So you went from hearing some promises to discovering gotchas in complex, decades old technology, decided to stop and then school the haskell community on topics they are very well aware of. How very modest of you, if only they could listen.

whateveracct 6y ago
some people spout answers when they should be asking questions

marcosdumay 6y ago

Honestly, I'm not much concerned with beginner friendliness. As long as there are enough users to maintain and improve its ecosystem, it will stay a good language. The moto of "avoid success at all costs" was correct, and if beginner friendliness comes at the expense of expert usefulness, I'll be glad the second is chosen. That said, none of that applies to those gotchas. They are clear problems with the language. None of them are obvious, but all of them are widely discussed so you will see them early when learning the language. Learning the gotchas of an ecosystem is a central part of learning any tool on informatics, and as gotchas go, one of the strong points of Haskell is that there are very little of them. You are making a very common complaint, that comes from ignoring the problems of the tools you know while making a fuzz over anything you find on the new one. It's almost certain that whatever languages you are used to, they have a much larger pile of gotchas than Haskell (because Haskell has an atypical small number of them), but that doesn't stop them from being useful.

_huayra_ 6y ago
Another point is that beginner-friendly languages don't always make expert-friendly languages. Python is great for beginners, but I have seen its lack of types create heaps of brittle code at companies that no one wants to touch. Some of the "C++ contenders" (besides Rust) like Nim, Zig, and potentially Swift seem to balance this line well: simple to start using, but grow with one's expertise.
bird_monster 6y ago
> You are making a very common complaint, that comes from ignoring the problems of the tools you know while making a fuzz over anything you find on the new one. It's almost certain that whatever languages you are used to, they have a much larger pile of gotchas than Haskell (because Haskell has an atypical small number of them), but that doesn't stop them from being useful. "Yeah well your language isn't good either" isn't a very good argument for why a language is _better_. If the idea is "Haskell works better than other languages as long as you happen to know how to make it so", isn't that just every language that exists? Due to Haskell's branding, I was under the impression that the issues the above user is describing should be impossible. If Haskell doesn't even make good on those guarantees, but instead shifts that guarantee as "Things you should've known not to do" onto the user, how is that different from any other language? edit And since this thread has a lot of tension and vague hostility, I will add, I am not attacking you or the language you enjoy. I legitimately would like to better understand.

nightski 6y ago

I wrote quite a bit of Haskell several years ago and sadly I have to agree! I understand why all the cruft is kept around - for one backwards compatability. But they really need a clean break to remove all the cruft and simplify things. There shouldn't be so many ways to do things (especially if some of those ways are just flat out wrong).