[Haskell-cafe] support request

[Tikhon Jelvis]

That's what they *say*, anyhow. In practice though, most managers have all
sorts of other concerns, some of which are blown way out of proportion or
sometimes completely irrational. The trick is to address these too.

One of the biggest things is the manager's version of premature
optimization: worrying about scale way too early. Not just scaling
technologically (although that might come up) but also hiring and training
lots of developers. All too often, they think that training developers in a
new language will be too difficult and that they need a market of
developers comparable to Java to be able to hire for their team.

The funny thing is that this is almost the opposite of what happens in
practice: using a language like Haskell actually makes it *easier* to hire
good developers. Haskell motivates programmers to apply more actively and
self-select, which is nice. This thread[1] has some testimony that might be
useful to show that hiring Haskellers is actually easy.

As far as training goes, it's also not too difficult. The IMVU blog post
mentioned earlier covers this:

> "Today, training an engineer to be productive in our Haskell code is not
much harder than training someone to be productive in our PHP environment.
 People who have prior functional programming knowledge seem to find their
stride in just a few days."

Their experience is that Haskell is actually pretty easy to teach if you
have strong opinions about style, idioms, libraries, extensions and so on.
The clear plan for what to cover is important. They covered this idea in
their BayHac[2] talk, which might be worth a look.

[1]: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/haskell-cafe/-HzmH5CVehM
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl3expkos4Q#t=483


On Fri, Jul 25, 2014 at 8:55 AM, Carter Schonwald <
carter.schonwald at gmail.com> wrote:

> Well said. If using a tool makes cheaper / faster to deliver a given set
> of features/level of quality, next week, business won't care how, just that
> it is.
>
>
> On Friday, July 25, 2014, Brandon Allbery <allbery.b at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Jul 25, 2014 at 7:25 AM, Закиров Марат <marat61 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I need to convince group of managers that Haskell is cool.
>>
>>
>> This sounds like getting off on the wrong foot from the start; managers
>> don't care about cool, they care about getting stuff done.
>>
>> --
>> brandon s allbery kf8nh                               sine nomine
>> associates
>> allbery.b at gmail.com
>> ballbery at sinenomine.net
>> unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad
>> http://sinenomine.net
>>
>
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