On Mon, 8 Oct 2007, Alistair Bayley wrote:
I posed the question: do we want to attract this kind of programmer?
My personal opinion, which some of you obviously don't share, is yes.
It isn't about whether or not the Haskell community needs those sorts
of programmers. It's whether or not those sorts of programmers need
Haskell.
You cannot turn any programmer into a disciplined programmer just by
giving him a well designed language. I you try so, they will not like to
use that language, will leave that language as soon as possible or they
try to adapt the language to their style of programming.
For me, a large part of Haskell's attraction are the features which
reflect good engineering practice: strong, static type checking;
People who are used to weak typing will use a type like
data Number = Int Int | Float Float | ...
for numbers, or even String for everything, they will use numbers, where
enumerations are more appropriate and so on.
purely functional code;
Undisciplined programmers will heavily use 'unsafePerformIO'
good FFI.
... and will call external C functions, where Haskell code is more
appropriate.
It should be easier to write simple, reliable software in Haskell than
in most other languages; IMO, getting the unwashed hordes to use Haskell
would be a great improvement in software industry productivity.
I realise that a large influx of mediocre programmers will have a
negative effect on the community, but is that a reasonable price to
pay? I understand that may of you love a small, intimate, high-quality
community, but perhaps that will have to evolve if we really want to
conquer the world.
New programmers want example programs and libraries to learn style and
tricks. The higher the portion of ill-designed libraries, the harder it is
too find good examples.
In my experience only the other way round works: Let people use C, Perl
and Python until they find their programs unmaintainable. Then they will
become interested in style and discipline and programming languages which
_support_ good style.
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