[Haskell-cafe] Aim Of Haskell

[Neil Bartlett]

I think this hits the nail on the head.

To be blunt, the presence of so many academics and scientists in the
Haskell community is intimidating to those of us that work "in industry".
Our brains are, after all, not as highly trained as yours, and we care
about different things than you do.

Now I don't mean to say that the academics and scientists should go away!
Far from it. Just that it would be great to hear more about the mundane
aspects of programming occasionally. Like, how exactly do I read from a
relational database with Haskell? Or process an XML file? Or build an
event-driven GUI? And crucially, why does Haskell do those things better
than Java, or C#, or Ruby? If somebody could write some articles on those
subjects, and get them up on popular websites like Digg or Reddit, this
would be far more helpful than yet another monad tutorial.

The Haskell web server that Simon Peyton-Jones et al described in their
paper would be a great example. But where's the download? How do I get a
copy to play with? In the "real world", things don't stop with the
publication of a paper ;-)

I think Haskell has huge potential to improve mainstream programming, if
it could only catch on a bit. I don't know how to make that happen,
unfortunately (if I did, I would do it, and hopefully get rich in the
process). But whatever Haskell needs, it's not getting at the moment.


Neil



> Hello Kaveh,
>
> Sunday, December 10, 2006, 6:15:23 PM, you wrote:
>
>> chosen one. But Haskell seems to be buzz-full research platform. Now
again to the top : what is the aim of Haskell project? If it is going to
be used in real world applications it needs more attention to real world
application developers and their needs.
>
> you are right - just now Haskell is a huge technology with non-obvious
path to learn. there is some work to make Haskell more pragmatic, but it's an
chicken-and-egg problem - we have a small number of pragmatic
programmers
> that use Haskell and therefore it's hard to change Haskell to suit their
needs, on the other hand this means that pragmatic programmers can't grok
> Haskell
>
> on the way to make Haskell more pragmatic i especially mention renewal
of
> Haskell standard to include modern language extensions, modern
programming
> environments such as WinHugs or BusinessObjects, development of
web/db/gui
> libraries, and definition of core (standard) libraries set
>
> one particular thing that we still lack is something like book "Haskell
in
> real world"
>
> --
> Best regards,
>  Bulat                            mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin at gmail.com
>
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