[Haskell-cafe] The last decade: what has changed, was has stayed the same?

[Joachim Durchholz]

Hi all,

I used to be interested in Haskell roughly a decade ago, then life happened.
Now that I'm setting up project work, I'm interested in what has been 
happening in the meantime.
I read a bit on the usual pages, did a quick scan of the mailing list, 
didn't find out what the important questions of today are and what 
answers exist.

Some ideas of relevant questions below.
Feel free to pose and answer your own questions :-)

After learning the bare language, how long does it take a competent 
programmer to become confident in the performance of his Haskell code?

After learning the bare language, how long does it take a competent 
programmer to know when and when not to use strictness 
annotations/operators?

I'm seeing a lot of typesystem golf happening.
Is this teachable to the average competent programmer?
Is it relevant to everyday programming such as business logic, database 
access, or webpage generation? (If no, for what programming endeavours 
is it relevant?)

What's the status of debugging - I dimly remember a rough consensus that 
stack traces are hard to interpret in a meaningful way.
(I know that debugging is far less important for a referentially 
transparent language than for others, but it would still be interesting.)

What's the status of all the "boring stuff":
- logging
- profiling
- dialog layout
- input validation
- database interaction
- webpage generation, webflow
- multi-tiered applications

On the "instant to-do" side: What would a competent programmer need to 
do to become a competent Haskell programmer?
(I suspect the usual set of toy projects will not work. Toy projects 
give you only so much mileage; in particular, you don't learn anything 
about what patterns will hold up for larger projects and what patterns 
won't scale.)

Regards,
Jo