[Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Jonathan Cast]

On Monday 16 July 2007, Hugh Perkins wrote:
> On 7/16/07, Malcolm Wallace <Malcolm.Wallace at cs.york.ac.uk> wrote:
> > 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!).
>
> You want people doing difficult expensive high-risk tasks to be intelligent
> and well trained, but you want their task to be as easy as possible.
>
> Would you rather a nuclear reactor needs to be controlled by feeding in
> punch cards, or by having a big round dial labelled "power", that you can
> move from 0 to 200 MegaWatts?  Of course, you'd like the guy moving that
> dial to be well trained and intelligent.  Welcome to why flying airlines is
> well-paid and boring.

*For airline pilots.*  For most people, flying airliners is poorly-paid and 
quite exciting (at least up until the inevitable crash).  Haskell may be a 
PhD language, but (that is, it isn't, but even if it were) it's quite easy to 
work in for PhDs.  Which isn't at all the same thing as being easy to work in 
for VB programmers.

Jonathan Cast
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fid-core
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fid-emacs