[Haskell-cafe] Aim Of Haskell

Kirsten Chevalier catamorphism at gmail.com
Wed Dec 13 09:23:45 EST 2006


On 12/13/06, Kaveh Shahbazian <kaveh.shahbazian at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think this is going out of the way. Excuse me, but the main discussion was
> not about pascal!

This list is exactly for off-topic discussions :-)

> And thanks again to all. Now I think there is a bigger whole between current
> situation of Haskell and using It as a real tool, than what I thought
> before.
> But any way; I still have a hope for rising a new folk of thinkers in
> software world that will put ideas to work more practically. Haskell got
> academic-centric-being syndrome, as JAVA got perfectionism syndrome (see
> elegant and useless design patterns and architectures there!).
> I can not imagine a pure and clear vision about this new folk that IT world
> lakes now. If anyone helps me with clarification of this thing, It will be
> great to me!

The reason why Haskell is academic-centric is that it was originally
conceived by academics, and they were interested in doing research
into language design and implementation and also had jobs to take care
of and all of this doesn't leave much time for being a language
evangelist or for figuring out what the practical issues might be (not
to mention sleeping at night). People outside academia who might be
inclined to take on some of those more practical questions are just
beginning to notice that Haskell could be useful for them too. The
reason this didn't happen earlier was that there was no marketing
budget. It had to happen in a grassroots fashion, and IMO it couldn't
have happened until after the rise of distributed open-source
development (which, I remind you, didn't start gaining a lot of
momentum until not that long ago).

You could become one of those "new folk of thinkers". Be the change
you wish to see.

Cheers,
Kirsten

-- 
Kirsten Chevalier* chevalier at alum.wellesley.edu *Often in error, never in doubt
"They say the world is just a stage you're on...or going through."
--Jim Infantino


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