[Haskell-cafe] Ideas

[Peter Verswyvelen]

>> *useful* language that people should learn and use? ;-)

>Actually, we aren't.  You might not have been able to tell, 
>but a core goal of our community is to stay small and avoid 
>success at all costs; our language is not practical, 
>not designed to be practical, and if it ever becomes practical, 
>it will have done so only by a terrible streak of bad luck.  
>Remember, success breeds inertia, and inertia would ruin 
>our fundamental goal of being an agile research language.

Well, IMHO the only reasons why Haskell is not a language for the masses
are:

- No marketing. If a company as big as Microsoft would decide that Haskell
is to become the standard language, then it would be so.

- Ancient IDEs. When someone comes from Eclipse or Visual Studio it feels
one is teleported back to the stone ages. Although Visual Haskell looks
promising, it seems to be in the pre-beta stage. 

- Although the documentation is very good, it is rather bulky, which can
scare away newbies. 

- As Haskell is currently used a lot by people with an average IQ of 160,
the available packages and programming approaches are not easily absorbed
for the average software engineer with an IQ of 120 ;-) However, once you
take your time to dig deep into the matter, one often sees the beauty behind
it. But many newbies just feel really stupid when they look at Haskell code
:) I certainly did and still do, but fortunately I know I'm not very clever,
so that's okay ;)

- I haven't looked at the debuggers, but I've heared Haskell is really hard
to debug. 

Anyway, although my IQ is far below 160, I find Haskell the most exciting
language I have ever learned (and I've only scratched the bare surface of
the language)

Cheers,
Peter Verswyvelen