[Haskell-cafe] How easy is it to hire Haskell programmers

[Andrew Coppin]

Edward Kmett wrote:
> "Knowledge of Haskell" means very different things to different 
> people. I'd be somewhat leery of blindly hiring someone based on their 
> ability to answer a couple of pop Haskell quiz questions.
>
> A better test might be if they really understood Applicative and 
> Traversable, or if they knew how to use hsc2hs; Talk about unboxing 
> and when to apply strictness annotations, finger trees, stream fusion, 
> purely functional data structures or ways to implement memoization in 
> a purely functional setting, or how to abuse side effects to do so in 
> a less pure way. Those are the kinds of things you get exposed to 
> through actually using Haskell, rather than through reading a monad 
> tutorial.

Hmm, interesting. Applicative and Traversable are two classes I've never 
used and don't really understand the purpose of. I have no idea what 
hsc2hs is. I keep hearing finger trees mentioned, but only in connection 
to papers that I can't access. So I guess that means that I don't count 
as a "knowledgable" Haskell programmer. :-(

On the other hand, I could talk for hours about stream fusion or STM. 
(Hell, I've even had a go at implementing both of these; the latter made 
it into The Monad Reader.) All of which conclusively demonstrates... 
something.