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

[Darrin Chandler]

On Fri, Jul 02, 2010 at 06:03:31PM +0100, Andrew Coppin wrote:
> 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.

One thing it might demonstrate is the inherent deficiency of using
litmus tests in evaluating applicants.

-- 
Darrin Chandler            |  Phoenix BSD User Group  |  MetaBUG
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