Comment by gassah_qwert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gassah_qwert | Hacker News Reader

Haskell is no doubt an interesting language. I have yet to work on a project where it was the obvious choice but I’ve played around with it enough to like it.

What I don’t like are some (not all) of the people who use Haskell and talk about it online. They can be incredibly obnoxious. Haskell is not a tool they work with, it’s their entrance to a class of software engineers that you’re not capable of being part of.

Just for the record: Anyone can learn Haskell. If you’re struggling with it that’s because of a tooling / literature issue. Haskell people (even the nice ones) are bad at explaining the language. The tooling isn’t very friendly and the language is a shit sandwich to debug.

The concepts therein are no more difficult to grasp than any other in programming. Is a Monad a box or a burrito? Please stop. It’s a language feature that allows you to do certain things more concisely than the alternative. Stop pretending it’s magic and show people how to use it and why they should. Stop drawing pictures.

No, algebraic data types are not hard to understand. You just make a big deal out of them because you think the word algebraic sounds cool.

I could keep going but I think I’ve made my point.

Dear Haskell people: Get over yourselves. Do not mistake the larger software community’s disinterest in your pet language for their inability to use it. That’s simply not the case. If people had to use it even ‘lowly js devs’ would master it.

Everyone else: If you haven’t used it already it is a very cool language and worth learning even if just for personal edification. Don’t let the self appointed high priests turn you off. Don’t expect their help either.

Sorry you've experienced this obnoxious behaviour. I've been in the community for years and never seen it. Maybe I'm not hanging out in the same places as you or I have some sort of unconscious bias that means I don't notice it.

Could you link me to an example? I have some measure of authority in the community and would like to help decrease the amount of obnoxiousness but I can't unless I know where it happens.

> Dear Haskell people: Get over yourselves. Do not mistake the larger software community’s disinterest in your pet language for their inability to use it. That’s simply not the case. If people had to use it even ‘lowly js devs’ would master it.

This is really interesting because the Haskell community I hang out with (mostly on Reddit) would love it if "lowly js devs" would master it. In fact we all too often get told by non-Haskellers that "Haskell will never succeed because it's too hard for most programmers to learn"!

Well, what about this article? It claims I just have to understand 4 basic concepts to replace java, python and Ruby.

Great, so using those simple properties let's reimplement Eclipse. Let me use tensor flow. Replace my Ruby on rail website.

FWIW, Haskell/Yesod has replaced all my Ruby on Rails websites.

But, can you do that with a tiny boring fragment of haskell, as described in the article?

Yes. All of the Haskell we write for our business is boring. More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21145872

While I'm happy you are having success and enjoying Haskell, I feel in the context of this article (you can have success in Haskell with a small easy fragment of the language), the use of the "Lens" package means you can no longer claim to be writing easy simple Haskell, unless you are using it in some way I'm unfamiliar with :)

I can see how (certain interpretations of) it could be considered wrong. I'm failing to see condescension.

The condescension is the authors assumption that this is right, and a tiny fraction of haskell can replace all uses of other major programming languages.

This to me (as a non haskell user) implies other languages can't have anything interesting to offer, as they can be so trivially replaced. That is the type of attitude I see from haskell programmers.

I see. Interpretations of that particular passage range from all the way from trivially true (Turing completeness) to trivially false (I can't build anything that uses Ruby on Rails in Haskell). Certainly there are some intermediate interpretations, like the one you suggest, by which it is condescending.

I replaced Rails with PostgREST, which is written in Haskell but for me as a user is just a binary that I run in front of my database, so now I don’t have to write any backend code at all.

Good enough for you?

I think that the obnoxious smugness is felt by those outside the community, not by those within it. This could be because the community is nicer to those inside, or because those outside perceive smugness where those inside do not. (I make no claim as to whether that is the fault of those inside, or those outside.)

Haskellers do tend to be very identitarian. Not unlike vegans, or CrossFitters.

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