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I don't buy that observation. Asking for practicality means asking if a thing connects with the outside world and whether it spans across its own domain. Most p

I don't buy that observation. Asking for practicality means asking if a thing connects with the outside world and whether it spans across its own domain. Most programmers with wide skillsets and experience I know are inherently practically oriented people. Focusing on practical things means avoiding digging yourself into an ivory tower, it's important to remember that programming languages are human artifacts and it's very easy to get lost in inventions we made up. Practicality is a measure of outwardness, not of curiosity. Many geniuses are very prone to get stuck in their own sky castles. In fact that's funnily mirrored in Haskell itself. I/O in Haskell was only added after the fact, the language started out kind of solipsistic leading to monadic IO as a solution to the question of "wait, how do we actually talk to the outside world guys?"

epgui 4y ago
The essence of my comment was meant to emphasize that going outside one's comfort zone very often requires some leap of faith. I'm not advocating learning only one thing and spending your life on that-- on the contrary, I'm saying if there's a subject you're not interested in (eg.: chemistry, accounting, actuarial science, invertebrate biology, whatever), it's probably because you don't know enough about it. The people who do know about topic X, do see its applications. There's almost always more to gain from learning a different thing than we tend to believe at the onset.