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If you don't understand why anyone would choose something that many people have chosen, you might want to be a little less bold in announcing what motivation th

If you don't understand why anyone would choose something that many people have chosen, you might want to be a little less bold in announcing what motivation those people must all have.

WastingMyTime89 5y ago
Oh but I know why they choose it. They want to geek out and feel smart. Haskell is somewhat unique regarding modern programming language in that it was created as a research project on programming language. Most other languages emerge as a solution to an engineering problem: C for Unix, Rust for Servo, Ocaml for Coq. If you allow me an analogy, a good programming language and its community starts wanting to build a great building and thinking their scaffolding technoly is inadequate. They then build better scaffolding as they are buildinh their building. Haskell started thinking they had a really cool way to build a scaffold and the community is still more interested in building scaffolding than actually using them. That's why there are more lense libraries than useful software built using Haskell.
- ebingdom 5y ago
  > They want to geek out and feel smart. Jesus Christ, I am so sick of you and all the people like you who repeat this lie. I've invested a lot of time learning about category theory, domain theory, type theory, etc. so I could become the best version of myself as a programmer, and I have seen very real benefit from this investment. Only to have you and these other people in HN tell me I'm just trying to "feel smart". Your arrogance is so off-putting to me. When did HN become so anti-intellectual? If you don't understand something, then either learn it or don't—but you don't need to bash other people for their own efforts.
  - WastingMyTime89 5y ago
    > Only to have you and these other people in HN tell me I'm just trying to "feel smart". Your arrogance is so off-putting to me. When did HN become so anti-intellectual? If you don't understand something, then either learn it or don't—but you don't need to bash other people for their own efforts. Listen, I have both an advanced degree in mathematics where I mostly did algebra and I have work for large software projects with hard constraints in the aerospace industry. I have nothing about people learning category theory. It's an interesting intellectual endeavour but people who think they are learning domain theory and category theory in order to be better engineers are just dicking around. It's not anti-intellectualism. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of what and where the problem actually is. Actually this last sentence sums up my issue with Haskell pretty well now that I think about it.
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
Yeah, um... let's be sure to apply that on all sides. I can't count the number of times I have read, here on HN, that people only choose imperative programming or OOP because they're ignorant or stupid. Because if they actually understood FP then of course they would choose it, so the only reason they don't is because they haven't learned or can't learn.

If you don't understand why anyone would choose something that many people have chosen, you might want to be a little less bold in announcing what motivation those people must all have.

WastingMyTime89 5y ago

Oh but I know why they choose it. They want to geek out and feel smart. Haskell is somewhat unique regarding modern programming language in that it was created as a research project on programming language. Most other languages emerge as a solution to an engineering problem: C for Unix, Rust for Servo, Ocaml for Coq. If you allow me an analogy, a good programming language and its community starts wanting to build a great building and thinking their scaffolding technoly is inadequate. They then build better scaffolding as they are buildinh their building. Haskell started thinking they had a really cool way to build a scaffold and the community is still more interested in building scaffolding than actually using them. That's why there are more lense libraries than useful software built using Haskell.

ebingdom 5y ago
> They want to geek out and feel smart. Jesus Christ, I am so sick of you and all the people like you who repeat this lie. I've invested a lot of time learning about category theory, domain theory, type theory, etc. so I could become the best version of myself as a programmer, and I have seen very real benefit from this investment. Only to have you and these other people in HN tell me I'm just trying to "feel smart". Your arrogance is so off-putting to me. When did HN become so anti-intellectual? If you don't understand something, then either learn it or don't—but you don't need to bash other people for their own efforts.
- WastingMyTime89 5y ago
  > Only to have you and these other people in HN tell me I'm just trying to "feel smart". Your arrogance is so off-putting to me. When did HN become so anti-intellectual? If you don't understand something, then either learn it or don't—but you don't need to bash other people for their own efforts. Listen, I have both an advanced degree in mathematics where I mostly did algebra and I have work for large software projects with hard constraints in the aerospace industry. I have nothing about people learning category theory. It's an interesting intellectual endeavour but people who think they are learning domain theory and category theory in order to be better engineers are just dicking around. It's not anti-intellectualism. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of what and where the problem actually is. Actually this last sentence sums up my issue with Haskell pretty well now that I think about it.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

Yeah, um... let's be sure to apply that on all sides. I can't count the number of times I have read, here on HN, that people only choose imperative programming or OOP because they're ignorant or stupid. Because if they actually understood FP then of course they would choose it, so the only reason they don't is because they haven't learned or can't learn.