[Haskell-cafe] Non-technical Haskell question

[Henning Thielemann]

On Tue, 30 Nov 2004, GoldPython wrote:

> Hi, all,
> 
> I'm new to the Cafe, but not to Haskell (experimented with it on and
> off on a small scale over the last 5 or 6 years and enjoy the language
> quite a lot) and had more of a political question and wanted to see
> what people thought:
> 
> Has anyone tried presenting the language to the average rank and file
> programming community?  If so, was it successful? If not, is there
> interest in doing so?

> By "rank and file" I mean, outside of the acedemic world where a large
> number of the programmers I see have very little math background. This
> would be the typical commercial Visual Basic crowd and the like.

Even inside the mathematical academic world, Haskell is not widely known
or even used. So, I'm advocating Haskell whereever I feel it is
advantageous compared to the languages in use. Though, the success makes
me doubting, if advocacy is always good. Programmers of traditional
languages convinced me that it is possible to write bad code in Haskell.
:-) It's also hard or impossible to convince people that it is good, that
some things are missing in Haskell for good reasons, such as global
variables. I observed that people don't like advocacy but want to make the
common errors themselves. It is better if they do them in C, Perl, MatLab,
whatever. If they have made enough mistakes and wonder if there are ways
around then they are at the point where advertising Haskell makes sense.