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Comment by paulsutter | Hacker News Reader

Hey, Haskell wouldn't be cool if /everybody/ used it. Some guys are totally down with bringing "the Foldable and Traversable typeclass to Prelude" and making "the existing function of Prelude more polymorphic", while others feel that just synergizes the wrong paradigm.

If you, like me, have no idea what this is about, just go back to coding in one of those subtheoretical languages for feeble minded norms, like me.

I'm sure these guys are doing some REALLY IMPORTANT WORK with a language as obscure as that. Way over my head, I'm sure.

EDIT: Scrollaway, thanks for asking. I don't really have a beef with Haskell itself, I just think its tragic that so many smart people are drawn to something that has .. well.. let's just say, I'd love to hear the practical aspects of Haskell.

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You mean those "subtheoretical languages" with "practical aspects" like deciding whether to use an abstract base class, which allows implementation inheritance for friends but violates encapsulation; or putting static final methods in an interface and using reflection to dynamically dispatch via a meta-object protocol to the contra-variant constructors of a private inner class?

All languages and paradigms can be obscure to outsiders. Just take a look at http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/object...

Judging from how shallow your reasoning appears to be, it is way over your head indeed.

This same line of reasoning is sometimes used against theoretical math. History keeps proving it wrong though.

I can't read Spanish. That's because I don't know Spanish. But does that mean that Spanish is a bad language? Or does it mean that Spanish speakers are somehow superior for writing this language I can't read? No. The Spaniards seem to be doing fine with it.

Got some inferiority complex showing here? What exactly is your problem with Haskell?

As I see it, the practical aspect of Haskell is to build things that are completely specified and need only be implemented. I can't imagine using it for anything remotely experimental, but if your job is implementing a completed spec, Haskell might well be worth the learning curve.

There is beauty in decrying the inapplicability of a purely functional thing:

Even if you wanted more function, you couldn't have it, because there isn't. And yet, you find that it has no function. None!

    Water, water, every where,
    And all the boards did shrink;
    Water, water, every where,
    Nor any drop to drink.

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