14 ms·

I may get some flak for this but Haskell still being called a research language is doing Haskell a huge disservice for adoption. The new ideas of Haskell are no

I may get some flak for this but Haskell still being called a research language is doing Haskell a huge disservice for adoption. The new ideas of Haskell are now old and well-known in programming languages research for over a decade. Seeing Haskell as a research language causes the community, by and large, to remain in an academic-mindset. But what the Haskell community needs now is an engineering-mindset. I think Doctor_Ryner in the OP states it perfectly: “In other communities people mostly discuss regular production problems and data structures, while in a Haskell chat people discuss monads, applicative functors, crazy types and things like that.” This is why use cases and how only Haskell enabled solving it are rare.

catach 4y ago
I suspect that the community is overall quite happy with increased adoption being a non-goal. That is, it does not need to shift to an engineering-mindset because it does not value the consequences of that shift.
- gilmi 4y ago
  I don't think that's correct. Especially since there's a community-led organization with the specific goal of increasing adoption https://haskell.foundation/ https://haskell.foundation/
  - kqr 4y ago
    I think there are many different people with different opinions in the community. The inofficial motto of 'avoid "success at all costs"' is not a joke. It's easy-ish to achieve success if you allow yourself to pander to the masses who don't always understand what they are missing, and there's always been an element in the Haskell community that tries to do what's right, notwithstanding what the large masses think.
    - gilmi 4y ago
      I agree that there are many opinions and that Haskell people don't want to compromise on what they see is the value of the language, but I've also seen a lot of people express their desire for more adoption. For example in threads talking about the haskell.org download page, in threads about improving learning resources, and with the Haskell Foundation. This desire is usually expressed with sentiments like "let's make this easier to learn" and "Let's fix this so it's not a footgun", and not "success at all cost".
    - havercosine 4y ago
      'Tried to it right notwithstanding what masses think' and commercial success are not exclusive. Two examples. Clojure's maintainers very carefully vet what goes into the core language. It has been a source of frustration for some contributors too. But the net result has been more positive than negative and the language has been successful (relative comparison with Haskell). Second example is Lua. There was a comment by its creator (I'm paraphrasing from memory) 'Lua grows by answering why, not by answering why not'. But it still has found (again, relatively more) success, despite being conservative about language feature-set.
  - catach 4y ago
    That's fair: calling it a "non-goal" is an overstatement. How about: the least-valued of all goals?

catach 4y ago

I suspect that the community is overall quite happy with increased adoption being a non-goal. That is, it does not need to shift to an engineering-mindset because it does not value the consequences of that shift.

gilmi 4y ago
I don't think that's correct. Especially since there's a community-led organization with the specific goal of increasing adoption https://haskell.foundation/ https://haskell.foundation/
- kqr 4y ago
  I think there are many different people with different opinions in the community. The inofficial motto of 'avoid "success at all costs"' is not a joke. It's easy-ish to achieve success if you allow yourself to pander to the masses who don't always understand what they are missing, and there's always been an element in the Haskell community that tries to do what's right, notwithstanding what the large masses think.
  - gilmi 4y ago
    I agree that there are many opinions and that Haskell people don't want to compromise on what they see is the value of the language, but I've also seen a lot of people express their desire for more adoption. For example in threads talking about the haskell.org download page, in threads about improving learning resources, and with the Haskell Foundation. This desire is usually expressed with sentiments like "let's make this easier to learn" and "Let's fix this so it's not a footgun", and not "success at all cost".
  - havercosine 4y ago
    'Tried to it right notwithstanding what masses think' and commercial success are not exclusive. Two examples. Clojure's maintainers very carefully vet what goes into the core language. It has been a source of frustration for some contributors too. But the net result has been more positive than negative and the language has been successful (relative comparison with Haskell). Second example is Lua. There was a comment by its creator (I'm paraphrasing from memory) 'Lua grows by answering why, not by answering why not'. But it still has found (again, relatively more) success, despite being conservative about language feature-set.
- catach 4y ago
  That's fair: calling it a "non-goal" is an overstatement. How about: the least-valued of all goals?