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>Edward Kmett is a Haskell evangelist Really? Could you point me to some of his evangelizing? Or did you mean "he uses haskell and is quite happy with it"?

• virtualwhys 13y ago
  There's nothing wrong with language evangelism, if you love the language you work in you'll evangelize it without even thinking about it. Kmett has, I believe, taken on a larger role in Haskell, perhaps officially with FP Complete. At any rate he does mention in one his videos (maybe on www.haskellcast.com) that he is coding less now due to his new obligations, which includes [completely from fallible memory] promoting [read: evangelizing] the language. >inconsistencies that the average programmer will never even realize exist. Referring to a presentation by Paul Phillips, an absolute Scala giant, and equating that with what the average Scala programmer encounters in their daily work does not negate my argument...in the slightest. When you leave Scala and remain on the JVM there is no better statically typed alternative, IMHO. When you leave the JVM, then yes, you can dive into Haskell and experience (compared to Scala) longer compile times, yelp o_O, poor to non-existent (IDE) tooling (just type :t in the REPL to see the inferred type, AKA beginner's joy), lack of an enterprise ecosystem, and yes, purity in all its glory, with a superior type system and quite a friendly community of mostly brilliant minds. In the end I'd say there's some degree of PITA everywhere, even in Haskell. Just getting my feet wet, maybe I'll learn to love it, but for now, to get shit done in the real world, it's Scala and the JVM.
  • asdasf 13y ago
    >There's nothing wrong with language evangelism He says, after suggesting you can't trust what someone says because they are an evangelist. >Kmett has, I believe, taken on a larger role in Haskell, perhaps officially with FP Complete FP complete is an independent company and has no official involvement in GHC or any other haskell implementation. Edward is not involved with FP complete. Edward is involved in the haskell community and the scala community. In neither case is he anything like an evangelist (which would make no sense anyways, you can't convert the converted). It seems odd that you are so adamant about inventing a fictional promotional context for him after claiming there's nothing wrong with that. >Referring to a presentation by Paul Phillips, an absolute Scala giant, and equating that with what the average Scala programmer encounters in their daily work does not negate my argument...in the slightest. Perhaps you should actually take the time to listen to it. A significant part of what he was saying was "this stuff matters". Just because the person doing the presentation knows scala very well, does not mean the problems he points out do not effect people who know scala less well. >When you leave Scala and remain on the JVM there is no better statically typed alternative, IMHO I am not sure how that is relevant. I don't care about the JVM. >Just getting my feet wet, maybe I'll learn to love it, but for now, to get shit done in the real world, it's Scala and the JVM. Or this. Do you remember the part where I tried to convince you to use haskell? Neither do I.
    • virtualwhys 13y ago
      > He says, after suggesting you can't trust what someone says because they are an evangelist. What the hell are you talking about? I provided a counterpoint to Kmett's detailing all that is wrong with Scala, by providing some of the good. Kmett is a living legend, I'm not questioning the guy's integrity; he went off in that reddit thread based on his [deep] experience of the language, which is entirely non-average. re: Paul Phillips, he's knows Scala probably better than anyone else on the planet; yes, the soundness of the compiler affects everyone, but those who are most bitten and bothered by it are library authors (read: advanced users), not end users who remain, for the most part, unaware of whatever issues may lie under the hood. > Or this. Do you remember the part where I tried to convince you to use haskell? Neither do I. Other than Haskell, given the context of the thread, which language might you be referring to as the better alternative to Scala? > You could leave for something better, keep all those things, and get tons of important things that you also won't realize you are missing until you get used to them and then try to live without them. That sounds great! I am curious about leaving Scala for something better -- please name this better alternative that is presumably not Haskell.