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

[Ivan Lazar Miljenovic]

Don Stewart <dons at galois.com> writes:

> 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 :-)

Knowing about something /= knowing how to use it.  I own and have read
RWH, but I've never had to use hsc2hs, or Applicative, etc.

-- 
Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
Ivan.Miljenovic at gmail.com
IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com