[Haskell-cafe] Aim Of Haskell

[Kirsten Chevalier]

On 12/12/06, Kaveh Shahbazian <kaveh.shahbazian at gmail.com> wrote:
> So you still want to pay your developers for checking "NULL" values,
> correctness of "INTERFACES", writing "IF ELSE" and "SELECT CASE"s full of
> side effect and junks (Something that can be simply implemented by "Pattern
> Matching"), continuing OO world that has not even a accurate calculus for
> describing things (and came from industrial engineering), code that may
> crash through exceptions and very stupid-complex execution paths, checking
> array out-of rang things, handling and passing and dereferencing pointers
> correctly...............OOOOH! Just calculate that how % of developer's time
> is being consumed by this stupid tasks? You know; this will be a big-bang
> for commercials! (If their stupid consultants can understand).

Yes. It's always hard to convince people that they've been doing
something the wrong way, though. "People" includes smart academic
types, sometimes, too. I think you're absolutely right, but if you
have ideas for what to say in those commercials, you can post them
here :-)

And of course it's not quite as simple as "people have been doing it
the wrong way", because sometimes there are reasons even for the kinds
of code that look the most horrible on the surface. Functional
programming people have a reputation for arrogance -- whether that
impression is fair or not and whether that arrogance is merited or
not, the impression exists, and some people find it a turn-off. Avoid
being the overenthusiastic convert.

> I am a usual developer, not smart and academic as you, and not as stupid
> ones to pretend to know something better than all. Even this kind of
> programming still is very hard for me. I am still struggling with monads and
> monad transformers! So I am choosing the hard path - even very hard one.
> Why? Because I am sure every mean developer like me can be productive in
> functional programming in 6 to 12 months. And imagine that huge bunch of
> stupid things that we are handling everyday : Just wast of life and money
> without any joy and honor.
> This is my vision : FIVE YEARS ...

I hope so! And I think if you got to know at least *some* of the smart
and academic types, you would find that they struggle sometimes too.

Cheers,
Kirsten

-- 
Kirsten Chevalier* chevalier at alum.wellesley.edu *Often in error, never in doubt
"What is research but a blind date with knowledge?" -- Will Henry