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

[Don Stewart]

andrewcoppin:
> 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. :-(

RWH is free and online, and covers many useful things. There's no excuse :-)

-- Don