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Comment by omaranto | Hacker News Reader

Looks like they don't acknowledge it on the landing page, but this is probably an implementation of Haskell, or of a dialect of Haskell.

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Oh, while the landing page doesn't mention Haskell, the documentation does (it says they don't use the name Haskell in an attempt to avoid the "26 years of psychology and perception that was built around the language").

That seems like wishful thinking. Anyone who knows anything about Haskell recognizes it on-sight. Anyone who doesn't will probably find it fairly radically different from what they're used to in a programming language, and not realize that it comes from a deep tradition with lots of community support.

I can sympathize with the reasoning behind the rebranding. "A new language on the JVM (which happens to be Haskell)" has a slightly different spin than "Haskell on the JVM". The latter sounds like it is targeted at Haskellers looking for new runtime choices, whereas the former is quite suggestive of moving Haskell a considerable step closer to the comfort zone of a certain group of non-Haskellers.

Unfortunately, the "(that happens to be Haskell)" part is completely left out on the entry page. This gives a terrible first impression, because it seems like if someone would be trying to bootleg those 26 years that went into Haskell and sell them of as their own achievement. The documentation does a reasonable effort to set this straight, but the aftertaste from the first impression remains.

While sharing the post, I did mention Haskell in the title to give a better picture. But I think the mods changed it.

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