Serious question: there was a time, a few years back, when the Haskell-ish languages seemed poised (finally!) for a breakthrough. Some of that was due to an association between Haskell and cryptocurrency, but there was also a sense that people were *ready* for Haskell’s particular vision. (I’m thinking of, say, PureScript as an alternative to both JavaScript and Elm)
That seems to have fizzled. Have there been writeups as to why?
@marick I'll be curious what you find out about pure functional languages.
I'm making my second go at learning haskell. I did #AdventOfCode in Haskell last year. In preparation for doing it again this year, I'm dusting off the VSCode environment and doing a few small problems.
I successfully used monads to carry state through a calculation. It was really cool. And it took me a week off-and-on to wrap my head around it. If I'd been doing it for years and it was just another tool in the belt, it would be an awesome tool to have.
For me, the mental shift from Java in my day job to Haskell is huge, and takes work. I can see why people don't use functional languages without a strong reason. And I've never been at a company where management provided (or allowed) a strong reason.
@schwaigbub @marick I like the “clone the CTO plan”. As the CTO, that should lower my workload. 🤣
Writing command line tools in Haskell does seem like a good place to start. Unfortunately, I was the one who made the rule that we have a critical mass of people who know a language before we start using it. That way we can count on having somebody who can maintain it.
@bwbeach @schwaigbub I’m not so sure about the “let Haskell take the blame for a project that’s doomed to fail” as a long-term adoption strategy.
I take a guilty pleasure in reading things in fields like “the social construction of technology” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_construction_of_technology), as it throws up surprising things like:
* We remember those funny big-front-wheel bicycles (“pennyfarthings”)
@bwbeach @schwaigbub * We note that our bicycles look nothing like that.
* We see that there are bicycles that appear evolutionarily intermediate.
@bwbeach @schwaigbub * We assume there was a logical progression from silly bicycles to sensible bicycles.
That doesn’t seem to have been the case. Pennyfarthings and safety bicycles coexisted, served different markets.
Pennyfarthings were for young men.
@bwbeach @schwaigbub Safety bicycles were for women, who obviously couldn’t go riding around with their crotches at eye level. To them, they primarily represented freedom from depending on men to move them around.
@marick @schwaigbub I very much enjoyed the 99PI episode on safety bicycles.
