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> 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 somethin

by 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.

by yladiz 6y ago

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.