[Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Malcolm Wallace]

"Alex Queiroz" <asandroq at gmail.com> wrote:

>      This is so much true. It has the effect of disguising Haskell as
> a PhD-only language.

And what would be wrong with Haskell being a PhD-only language, if it
were true?

OK, so I'm not genuinely suggesting that you must possess or be studying
for a PhD, to grok Haskell.  But I find nothing alarming about the
suggestion that one needs a fairly high level of intelligence, and some
training, in order to be able to use Haskell effectively.

After all, we would expect the same attributes (intelligence and
training) from a neurosurgeon, a nuclear scientist, or someone who
calculates how to land a person on the moon.  Programming computers may
not seem very skilled to most people, but maybe that is simply because
we are so familiar with it being done so badly.  I'm all for improving
the quality of software, and the corollary is that that means improving
the quality of programmers (by stretching our brains!).

Regards,
    Malcolm