[Haskell-cafe] Elevator pitch for Haskell.

[Dan Weston]

And here's my guide for public health officials...

WARNING: Learning Haskell is dangerous to your health!

Disguised as a fully-functional programming language, Haskell is 
actually a front for a working math-lab, supported by a cult of 
volunteers seeking to ensnare weak-headed but normal programmers 
susceptible to the dogma that laziness is a virtue.

Though cut with syntactic sugar to be more palatable to newbies, each 
Haskell construct is in fact a contagious mix of higher-order functions, 
lambda expressions, and partial applications, a highly addictive gateway 
drug to category theory, initial algebras, and greco-morphisms.

Some users have gotten trapped inside an IO monad unable to get out 
safely, and even gone mad trying to decipher commutative diagrams or 
perfect their own monad tutorial. Signs of addiction include prefixing 
co- to random words or needlessly replacing recursive functions with 
combinators and pointfree notation. The least fixed point of this 
unnatural transformation is the inability to find joy in the use of 
imperative programming languages. In some cases, hackage is irreversible 
and can lead to uncontrolled blogging.

Further study is needed to understand the strong correlation between 
intelligence and Haskell addiction. Meanwhile, those at risk should be 
made to program in teams to suppress their creative drive.

Dan Weston

Paul Johnson wrote:
> This page (http://www.npdbd.umn.edu/deliver/elevator.html) has a 
> template for an "elevator pitch".  This is what you say to someone when 
> you have 30 seconds to explain your big idea, for instance if you find 
> yourself in an elevator with them.  I thought I'd try instantiating it 
> for Haskell.
> 
> For software developers who need to produce highly reliable software at 
> minimum cost, Haskell is a pure functional programming language that 
> reduces line count by 75% through reusable higher order functions and 
> detects latent defects with its powerful static type system.  Unlike Ada 
> and Java, Haskell allows reusable functions to be combined without the 
> overhead of class definitions and inheritance, and its type system 
> prevents the hidden side effects that cause many bugs in programs 
> written in conventional languages.
> 
> Comments?
> 
> Paul.
> 
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