[Haskell-cafe] Re: Why Exotic Languages Are Not Mainstream

[Bulat Ziganshin]

Hello Shae,

Monday, August 14, 2006, 1:11:49 AM, you wrote:

>> - lack of specialists (and this means lack of teaching, training, books)

> There's lots of interactive teaching and training on #haskell
> What exactly do you think is missing?

high school. while some advanced universities teach FP to students.
most high schools just teach C++ or smth like this. at least, here in
Russia students learn things that business was used 10 years ago while
they should learn things that business will use 10 years later (and
form this business environment!)

skill raising courses. in my town, there are courses for Delphi, C++,
at Moscow there are courses for Java, C#, perl, php. again, rare
languages are out of luck

books. there are tons of books that teach c++, from "C++ for dummies"
up to "Using booost::lambda to create 24/7 apps" and no more than
dozen for entire Haskell with all its extensions/libs. it's not
enough to learn Haskell in deep

>> - lack of variety of libraries (application programmers want to have many
>> libraries pre-written)

> Which libraries do you think are most needed?

gui+db for standalone apps, i don't know exact requirements for web apps

also plenty of libs that is used in any program: data structures,
string processing, regexps, networking, concurrency, so on, so on

>> imvho, these issues are less important for system programming (such as
>> creating of web server or CMS system), so Haskell, with all its features, now
>> is a great tool for system programming. for example, i've written zip-like
>> tool with ghc

> FreeArc is way nifty!

thank you :)  i thought that it is interesting only for
Russian-speaking haskellers because all comments are in Russian

even for this quite enough system program i required the following
libraries: ByteString, Binary, filename manipulation and matching,
string processing, advanced I/O. most of these was done at the moment
when i wrote my code, but was not readily available, concealing itself
in labyrinths of ghc, darcs and other apps :)



-- 
Best regards,
 Bulat                            mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin at gmail.com