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Put yourself in an author's shoes. git annex doesn't exist in the world - but you have the idea for it. Haskell is your strongest language, and honestly you don

Put yourself in an author's shoes. git annex doesn't exist in the world - but you have the idea for it. Haskell is your strongest language, and honestly you don't really like programming in other languages. So you write it in Haskell and it works and becomes a somewhat popular piece of plumbing. For projects I write at least, I'm that author. My projects wouldn't even exist if I didn't use Haskell. So thinking about optimizing for long tail contributions by anonymous users is illogical on the face of it. It sounds to me you wouldn't think any open source project should be written in Haskell for these reasons. That seems silly to me. Also - I've contributed, debugged, etc projects in many languages I barely know. It's not that hard if you're actually talented and experienced. I actually fixed a bug in a small, single-author Haskell library for my first ever project. I hadn't even finished LYAH let alone fully understand what I had read. So when a supposedly "very experienced" software engineer "cannot learn Haskell" enough to make small changes, I raise my eyebrow. You can't do better than 21 year old me with 0 professional experience and 0 formal FP education?

ithkuil 3y ago
I didn't claim that you shouldn't use whatever language you want to write your software. By all means use whatever you like most for whatever reason. On the other hand, I don't think we should be framing other people as "lazy" or "non senior enough" or whatever just because they make a different choice in how to spend their time. After all time spent in something has an opportunity cost and people make different choices. I'm saying that as a language nerd who learned most of mainstream and not so mainstream languages out there just of the sheer joy of doing it. I do understand there are people out there that are not like me and that doesn't mean I'm better than them, just different

ithkuil 3y ago

I didn't claim that you shouldn't use whatever language you want to write your software. By all means use whatever you like most for whatever reason. On the other hand, I don't think we should be framing other people as "lazy" or "non senior enough" or whatever just because they make a different choice in how to spend their time. After all time spent in something has an opportunity cost and people make different choices. I'm saying that as a language nerd who learned most of mainstream and not so mainstream languages out there just of the sheer joy of doing it. I do understand there are people out there that are not like me and that doesn't mean I'm better than them, just different