[Haskell] Status of Haskell'?

[Jason Dusek]

2012/12/1 Tijn van der Zant <robotijn at gmail.com>:
> I think that there is more to take into account.
> Haskell is growing as a language that people use to solve scientific and
> business problems. It is starting to become more of a working language,
> which is a very good thing of course. But this also means that Haskell
> should accommodate the people who are only working with it (not developing
> the language) and might not have a clue about the developers of the
> language. I'm somewhere in between where I love to read about the
> developments (this is my first post) and use it to program robots in my lab
> (besides some other languages).
> To accommodate the people who just want to use Haskell, we might have a
> super-pragma (as previously proposed) and for those gaining skill it should
> be possible to subtract pragmas until you have turned them all off and you
> can call yourself a Haskell guru. Mind you, I am not one of those, simply
> because I have to program in 5 languages for my work. For me, all those
> pragmas are not a matter of ugliness, but more an annoyance. For starters it
> is even worse. They ask questions such as: What do I turn on? Did I already
> find a good pragma tutorial? Why do I need to know about pragmas if it is
> already difficult to learn the language? By subtracting the pragmas (or
> turning them off) people can learn what they actually do and improve their
> code and their thinking about the language.
> Quite often I need the get something done, and due to time pressure I do not
> always have the luxury to make the code beautiful. And since it is Haskell
> (if it compiles it probably does what you want) I do not always care. For
> many users, pragmas are a Haskell concept that they can live without in the
> first part of their Haskell programming career (and they just turn a load of
> them on without even thinking about it what they do, but hey, the code works
> now!...)
> I think that we should accommodate the 'working programmers' and make their
> life a little bit easier, so that it becomes easier to start programming in
> Haskell and the language can be put to use by more people.
> This does not exclude having a 'pragma prime' that includes proposals for
> Haskell' of course. But it would help people starting with Haskell a lot
> imho.

Thank you for highlighting the many ways in which pragmas are
a problem from a practical point of view.

--
Jason Dusek
pgp // solidsnack // C1EBC57DC55144F35460C8DF1FD4C6C1FED18A2B