[Haskell-cafe] Proposed "Restructuring" of State Monad page in Haskell Wikibooks

[Tom Smeding]

Hi all,

Branimir wrote:
> Two years is not enough to do anything serious in Haskell. That is beyond
demo programs.

This statement carries a lot of assumptions, some of which may be true in
this case, some of which may not -- I don't know David James -- but I think
it isn't good to let this statement stand on its own like that.
If a student who has never programmed before starts learning Haskell, they
will not be able to succeed professionally after just two years unless they
have other useful background knowledge and/or talent (let's not discuss
whether talent is a thing or not). However, the email by David James did
not sound like he is a beginner in the act of programming; indeed, with
experience in imperative (C++, VB), declarative (SQL), functional (Lisp)
and logic (Prolog) programming languages, that certainly does not count as
"has never programmed before". And I think we can agree that someone with
sufficient experience in programming at large can learn to use Haskell
effectively in two years (which is quite a long time, even if it's
irregular practice). At least, I strongly believe this until proven
otherwise. If that is indeed not the case, then something is seriously
wrong on Haskell's side, as Gregory has noted below.

David: I haven't read your rewritten State monad tutorial, for which my
apologies; also apologies for kind of derailing this thread.

Cheers, and have a great day,
Tom Smeding

P.S. This message wasn't accepted by the mailing list earlier, so was just
sent to some people personally. Sorry for duplicate emails.

On Tue, 29 Sep 2020 at 15:14, Gregory Guthrie <guthrie at miu.edu> wrote:

> If this is true, Haskell will probably never move up into even the top 40
> of used languages, which would be too bad! And it would be interesting to
> see why – certainly people find good productivity in the mainstream IP
> languages in even 6-9 months.
>
>   (Look at salaries from bootcamp placements.)
>
>
>
> Currently Haskell is significantly below Cobol, Fortran, Lisp, and Pascal
> in the language usage/ratings.   :-(
>
>
>
>
>
> Dr. Gregory Guthrie
>
> Maharishi International University
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
> *From:* Haskell-Cafe <haskell-cafe-bounces at haskell.org> *On Behalf Of *Branimir
> Maksimovic
> *Sent:* Tuesday, September 29, 2020 7:17 AM
> *To:* haskell-cafe at haskell.org
> *Subject:* Re: [Haskell-cafe] Proposed "Restructuring" of State Monad
> page in Haskell Wikibooks
>
>
>
> Two years is not enough to do anything seroius in Haskell. That is beyond
> demo programs.
>
>
>
> Greets, Branimir.
>
>
>
> On 9/28/20 6:37 PM, David James wrote:
>
> Hello – I’m proposing to restructure this
> <https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Understanding_monads/State>, and I
> have a draft here
> <https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Davjam2:Example/StateMonad>. I’ve given my
> main reasons for the restructuring at the top of the draft page.
>
>
>
> I’d very much like feedback before updating the real page, especially if
> people don’t like the new one much.
>
>
>
> I’m new here, so should probably say a bit about myself. I’ve been
> learning-by-doing Haskell for about two years. Sometimes I feel I’m
> starting to get it, but these feelings don’t usually last long. I’m
> certainly not an expert, and don’t have a PhD in Very Clever Things. I do
> have quite an extensive IT background, originally programming in Lisp and
> Prolog, then (sadly) C++, VB and SQL but have had quite a long break from
> programming (doing dumb things like architecting systems and project
> managing) before looking at Haskell. I built this website
> <https://decimos.net/> and this library
> <https://hackage.haskell.org/package/MapWith>, just for my own amusement.
>
>
>
> Apologies if this isn’t the right place to send this. (But then where is?)
> I’ve already put a note on the page itself about the new draft, but I’ve no
> idea whether anyone will notice it.
>
>
>
> Thanks very much,
>
> David.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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