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In my opinion the problem with Haskell is that terminology from computer language research (e.g. type theory) bleed into language which combined with sometimes

In my opinion the problem with Haskell is that terminology from computer language research (e.g. type theory) bleed into language which combined with sometimes appearing "elitarism" makes it just not very appealing for anyone not being deep into the relevant parts of computer since research. I mean I don't need to know how engineers speak about the internals of my car to drive it (but it can be helpful), but Haskell kinda expects that. Also it's not uncommon in Haskel to see functionality named not after what it does but after the theoretical computer since properties it has. Which might describe how you can combine it on a type system level but isn't that useful for easily writing programs and makes any "types as documentation" much worse.

FridgeSeal 6y ago
I suspect this is because Haskell is proudly a "research"/bleeding-edge language. It's distinctly _not_ a Java or a .Net and that's ok, as it's not trying to fulfill the same role. Things in Haskell have names from theoretical computer science, because people are using it to express and experiment with those ideas - they don't need or want to spend undue time describing a monad or a functor for the 15-millionth time, they want to use them in some new cutting-edge way. I once saw (on this website) Haskell described as "the primordial soup of programming language features". Wild and weird ideas get tried-out in Haskell, and then 5-10 years later someone takes the lessons learned from the evolution of some feature in Haskell and brings it to mainstream programming in some elegant, distilled form. And I think that's super cool.
sfvisser 6y ago
Haskell has many problems, but this really isn’t one of them.
sordina 6y ago
Please keep in mind, when Haskell introduced some of these features they decided to take existing terminology from theory rather than make something up. The big benefit from this is that people already with the theoretical terminology have an intuition to start from, plus, users of the language also build some intuition for the theory. Win win. Given that they often broke ground on the features and couldn't borrow from other languages can you say this was a bad decision?

FridgeSeal 6y ago

I suspect this is because Haskell is proudly a "research"/bleeding-edge language. It's distinctly _not_ a Java or a .Net and that's ok, as it's not trying to fulfill the same role. Things in Haskell have names from theoretical computer science, because people are using it to express and experiment with those ideas - they don't need or want to spend undue time describing a monad or a functor for the 15-millionth time, they want to use them in some new cutting-edge way. I once saw (on this website) Haskell described as "the primordial soup of programming language features". Wild and weird ideas get tried-out in Haskell, and then 5-10 years later someone takes the lessons learned from the evolution of some feature in Haskell and brings it to mainstream programming in some elegant, distilled form. And I think that's super cool.

sfvisser 6y ago

Haskell has many problems, but this really isn’t one of them.

sordina 6y ago

Please keep in mind, when Haskell introduced some of these features they decided to take existing terminology from theory rather than make something up. The big benefit from this is that people already with the theoretical terminology have an intuition to start from, plus, users of the language also build some intuition for the theory. Win win. Given that they often broke ground on the features and couldn't borrow from other languages can you say this was a bad decision?