[Haskell-cafe] New slogan for haskell.org

[Peter Verswyvelen]

For me, a good reason why one should look at Haskell is because you 
should NOT look at Haskell since it will change your view on programming 
so much, you don't want to go back... ;-)

But where is the great IDE Haskell deserves??? :-) Seriously, 99% of the 
programmers I know don't want to look at it because when they see Emacs 
or VIM, they say "what the f*ck????, I don't want to go back to the 
stone age". If you want to attract more people that are inside the 
"imperative-OO-with-nice-IDE-blob", create a great looking and 
functional IDE. An IDE that integrates the existing tools. That shows 
you graphical pictures of the graph rewriting process, potential space 
leaks, profiling bottlenecks, etc. Heck, why not introduce pictures as 
symbols and values, as in DrScheme. Or UNICODE fonts. or or ... Okay, 
enough of that, off topic ;-)

Donn Cave wrote:
>
> On Oct 5, 2007, at 1:59 AM, Bayley, Alistair wrote:
>
>>
>> So the question becomes: do you want to attract/seduce this kind of
>> programmer? Let's assume the answer is yes :-)
>
> Hmm...
>
>> ... Then what sort of
>> language should you use in your promotional paragraph? I don't think
>> "polymorphism", "monads/monadic effects", "higher order functions", and
>> even "type classes" should be used. These terms will be universally
>> unfamiliar to the target audience, and will alienate them.
>
> Maybe.  Good.  Some readers will say to themselves `this language appears
> to have many unfamiliar features ... I must look into this!'  At this 
> point, these
> are only ones who are going to thrive anyway.
>
> From what I've seen, the greatest hurdle is the features that ARE 
> familiar,
> particularly strong static typing.  Everyone knows static typing from 
> Pascal,
> C, C++, Java ... know what I'm saying?  If there's some way to defeat 
> this
> false recognition, that should help a lot.
>
> Or maybe that's good too, for more survivor self selection.  Maybe a good
> slogan would be `like LISP, but with strong static typing!'
>
>     Donn Cave, donn at drizzle.com
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