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I learned that supposedly the Haskell motto "avoid success at all cost" wasnt suppose to mean what people think: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12056169 h

I learned that supposedly the Haskell motto "avoid success at all cost" wasnt suppose to mean what people think: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12056169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12056169 https://discourse.haskell.org/t/new-blog-post-haskell-doomed-to-succeed/1662 https://discourse.haskell.org/t/new-blog-post-haskell-doomed... I honestly think this is/was an idiotic move; especially since the alternative reading 'avoid "success-at-all-cost"' is not thaaat much better, like (from the second link): "An example is I/O. For literally years Haskell had no I/O to speak of; more precisely, I/O was unreasonably difficult. For practical utility that was pretty inconvenient. But we stuck to purity…" I mean, would you want to rest your business on such an attitude? (Which is a great attitude, also gave monads, explained in the link, and advanced the language while keeping it pure). I am not saying a language/environment has to be business friendly, but if you want businesses to use it, it better be.

pyrale 5y ago
> I mean, would you want to rest your business on such an attitude? From a business pov, the idea would be to assess whether you're happy with what can be done in userland rather than expect syntactic or semantic changes. I can't think of a company that started doing haskell waiting for future features to be added in the language.
WJW 5y ago
> I mean, would you want to rest your business on such an attitude? Haskell started as a research language by academics, for academics. Business concerns have not been a large concern in its language evolution. That's fine IMO, it's good to have a place where CS researchers can experiment relatively freely without having Big Corporate Stakeholders demanding absolute backwards compatibility for all time (see Python 2->3 for an example of that). The best parts of Haskell have slowly been copied by other languages (for example: typeclasses became traits in Rust, list comprehensions are in Python, goroutines look a LOT like Haskell threads, etc), while the experiments that didn't work out as much (lazy I/O for example) just don't get copied. "It's no good for business" just misses the point of a research language completely IMO. That said, some people want to make it more business-oriented and have been making strides towards that goal. Haskell does not really have a BDFL, so anyone can (try to) move the ecosystem in any direction they wish.
- andi999 5y ago
  I agree it is good to have it as a research language; but one shouldnt expect jobs in that field then (which the op seems to do). One can hope though.

pyrale 5y ago

> I mean, would you want to rest your business on such an attitude? From a business pov, the idea would be to assess whether you're happy with what can be done in userland rather than expect syntactic or semantic changes. I can't think of a company that started doing haskell waiting for future features to be added in the language.

WJW 5y ago

> I mean, would you want to rest your business on such an attitude? Haskell started as a research language by academics, for academics. Business concerns have not been a large concern in its language evolution. That's fine IMO, it's good to have a place where CS researchers can experiment relatively freely without having Big Corporate Stakeholders demanding absolute backwards compatibility for all time (see Python 2->3 for an example of that). The best parts of Haskell have slowly been copied by other languages (for example: typeclasses became traits in Rust, list comprehensions are in Python, goroutines look a LOT like Haskell threads, etc), while the experiments that didn't work out as much (lazy I/O for example) just don't get copied. "It's no good for business" just misses the point of a research language completely IMO. That said, some people want to make it more business-oriented and have been making strides towards that goal. Haskell does not really have a BDFL, so anyone can (try to) move the ecosystem in any direction they wish.

andi999 5y ago
I agree it is good to have it as a research language; but one shouldnt expect jobs in that field then (which the op seems to do). One can hope though.