[Haskell-beginners] is Haskell practical?

[emacstheviking]

I read all the above. I have to agree with KC... I have been a software
developer for 30+ years now and I would dearly love to be able to use
Haskell in my day to day tasks when being paid. As an IT contractor in the
UK however that just isn't going to happen. By and large the management /
project planning mentality is "lowest common denominator" when it comes to
large IT projects. It's not hard to understand the reasons and from a
commercial and business perspective it makes sense, of course it does.

I've been working on the UK MOT programme (now complete) for the last 18
months and it was all PHP, Zend Framework 2 and Doctrine because that skill
pool is huge compared to Haskell and when it comes to having a ready supply
of code capable meat-sacks to deliver stories on time, LCD is where it will
always be. TIOBE says that Java has been top dog for ever. I rest my case.

Us in the haskell world realise that people that can use Haskell
effectively would be much more productive, and probably produce a lot more
functional(!) code in a shorter space of time, have a high sprint velocity,
deliver more stories etc. Quickcheck is inspired!

The thought of being on an Agile team using haskell, wow, that's too much
to hope for...

All the best,
Sean Charles

On 25 November 2015 at 18:13, KC <kc1956 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes Haskell is practical except for finding Haskell replacement
> programmers.
>
> --
> --
>
> Sent from an expensive device which will be obsolete in a few months! :D
>
> Casey
>
> On Nov 25, 2015 9:50 AM, "Martin Vlk" <martin at vlkk.cz> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Dennis Raddle:
>> > On Wed, Nov 25, 2015 at 4:56 AM, Alexander Berntsen <
>> alexander at plaimi.net>
>> > wrote:
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>> > I don't agree. Having worked for 16 years in a government aerospace
>> > contractor doing C++ and Python programming, what I saw is that maybe
>> half
>> > the programmers struggled with precise thinking and abstraction. They
>> > thought of programs as step-by-step recipes and implemented those
>> recipes
>> > in exactly the same way they themselves had always thought about a
>> problem.
>> >
>> > Also having worked as a math tutor, I see many people who struggle with
>> > abstract thinking.
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>> > Can an "okay" imperative programmer become an "okay" Haskell programmer?
>> > Does the necessary skill, work, motivation, and talent to program at an
>> > "ordinary" imperative level serve as a sufficient prerequisite for
>> > functional programming? I really don't think so, but I could be wrong.
>>
>> What'd be the definition of an okay programmer? If we agree that's the
>> one that "learns how to solve a few standard problems and then applies
>> the same thing over and over without much creativity", then I'll argue
>> this will work with Haskell just like with any imperative language. If
>> you train them on Haskell that is. :-)
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>> > But I wonder if the same mechanisms that make Haskell concise (which are
>> > some of the things that make it hard) also are bound up with its
>> practical
>> > advantages so that they can't be separated.
>>
>> What you mean by practical? Does it mean that you can find enough people
>> able to use it in your real-world project, without putting too high
>> requirements on training them?
>>
>> If so, then we could say that given the current state of affairs, where
>> the mass of okay programmers are trained on a different paradigm,
>> Haskell is not all that practical.
>>
>> But if practical means that the language is well suited for solving
>> real-world problems, in beautiful ways, once you get it, then it is
>> uberpractical! :-)
>>
>> M.
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