[Haskell-cafe] Comments from OCaml Hacker Brian Hurt

[Jonathan Cast]

On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 10:56 -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
> Lennart Augustsson wrote:
> > Most people don't understand pure functional programming either.  Does
> > that mean we should introduce unrestricted side effects in Haskell?
> 
> The key is to introduce concepts to them in terms they can understand.
> 
> You introduce it one way to experienced abstract mathematicians, and a
> completely different way to experienced Perl hackers.  I wouldn't expect
> a mathematician to grok Perl, and I wouldn't expect $PERL_HACKER to grok
> abstract math.  People have different backgrounds to draw upon, and we
> are under-serving one community.

False.  We are failing to meet the un-realistic expectations of advanced
Perl/Python/Ruby/C/C++/Java/any other imperative language programmers as
to the ease with which they should be able to learn Haskell.

jcc