[Haskell-cafe] Ideas

[Andrew Coppin]

Peter Verswyvelen wrote:
> 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.
>   

See, for example, Java...

> - Ancient IDEs. 
>   

Can't comment. Every IDE I've used recently sucked anyway. ;-)

> - 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 have an IQ of 103. Apparently. (This makes me officially the most 
stupid person on the povray.off-topic newsgroup...)

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

OTOH, Haskell requires less debugging in the first place. ;-)

> 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)
>   

Indeed. Personally, I don't *want* Haskell to be a research language. I 
want Haskell to be The Next Big Thing. I want to see newspapers full of 
people trying to recruit Haskell programmers rather than all this C / 
C++ / Java stuff. ;-)

Still, it will never happen... Would be nice if I could convince people 
that Haskell isn't just for idiots though.