[Haskell-cafe] New slogan for haskell.org

Emre Sahin iesahin at bilkent.edu.tr
Wed Dec 12 04:13:43 EST 2007


>>>>> gwern0  <gwern0 at gmail.com> writes:

    > If the reader is still interested and still takes Haskell
    > seriously after puzzling over the foregoing, this would either
    > be pointless or off-putting. Well, *of course* there are
    > compilers for most computers. You aren't a serious
    > general-purpose language in this day and age if there aren't
    > compilers free for most computers. Such a line either tells the
    > reader what they assume to be true, or strikes them as 'the lady
    > doth protest too much, methinks'...

    > So, the Haskell one uses more than twice as many technical
    > terms, uses more off-putting ones, offers less information, does
    > not reassure as Python's does that switching costs are not high,
    > and so on.

    > It needs to change.

    > Now, the Main Page on haskell.org is not protected, so I could
    > just edit in one of the better descriptions proposed, but as in
    > my Wikipedia editing, I like to have consensus especially for
    > such visible changes.

    > How do you think the description could be improved?

Why don't you let Haskell speak for itself?

Instead of putting such buzzwords nobody really understands (and
cares), put random problem descriptions and one-line solutions in
Haskell. Well known problems like Fibonacci, Quicksort, etc. may be
good candidates, even "add 1 to all elements of an Integer list" may
be. 

First impressions of a language usually not by a slogan, I don't tell
my friends about Haskell saying "it's a statically typed, functional,
blah blah blah" language. Instead "the thing that you write with a
loop in C, I write in Haskell like this --oh, and it also has infinite
lists..."

I think Haskell code impresses me much more that those words. 

Emre









More information about the Haskell-Cafe mailing list