[Haskell-cafe] Haskell's "historical futurism" needs better writing, not better tools

[Tom Ellis]

On Fri, Sep 17, 2021 at 06:54:50PM +0900, Michael Turner wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 17, 2021 at 4:58 PM Tom Ellis
> <tom-lists-haskell-cafe-2017 at jaguarpaw.co.uk> wrote:
> > Michael, I have an offer for you (in fact two):
> >
> > 1. I will collaborate with you to produce the guide to Haskell's
> > evaluation that *you* would want to read.
> >
> > 2. I will collaborate with you to write the NLP tool that you want to
> > write in Haskell.
> 
> I think if I write anything long, it would first have to be my
> "Haskell in Plain English: A Guide for Lexical Semanticists."

Fair enough.

> > I can't do these without collaborating with someone like you.  I
> > simply don't know what someone else wants to read.
> 
> So much of good writing is just figuring out an audience. As I wrote
> to Viktor above, the section he presented to me in case I had trouble
> with it could be absolutely ideal for someone with more grounding.
> They could admire the sentence I struggled with, for how it
> encapsulates their understanding while refreshing their memory.

Yes indeed.  The audience that I write for is myself since that's the
audience I know.  I am interested in writing for a more general
audience but I don't have motivation at the moment to do so without a
member of that general audience on the team.

> I'm not sure that gearing a piece toward what /I/ would like to read
> is a much bigger audience

I suspect the group of people who are interested in yet frustrated by
Haskell is *far* bigger than the group of people who are already
familiar with Haskell!

> If I had to suggest an approach you could try on your own, it would
> be this:

Thank you for the suggestion.  I will bear it in mind if I decide to
tackle this in the future.

Tom