On Jul 30, 2008, at 2:48 PM, Max Battcher wrote: > Ashley Moran wrote: >> Right now it's hard to get into Haskell - I know because I'm trying. >> The barrier to entry is high - and if in reality it isn't high, *the >> Haskell community must make that known*. > > It really shouldn't be that high. If you are having serious problems > may I recommend taking a pit stop in the land of Lisp or Scheme?
I'm sorry to agree to disagree, since I'm a pretty adequate CL hacker. Haskell is easy to read, but like APL, it is almost a write- once language. Especially when it comes to hacking out a bit of code only to discover that the compiler and interpreter balks over the lack of type specificity or required refinement. Of course, in hindsight, once you get used to the type system's strictness, it isn't that bad. But I can't tell you how many of my "research days off" (from doing management stuff) I've wasted unproductively trying to get Haskell code to correctly compile. Yes, the barrier to entry is pretty high. And about that "Monad" stuff... how many tutorials are necessary to explain what should be an easy concept, but in reality, is relatively complex? (No, I'm not going to contribute yet another Monad tutorial and I still have to remind myself what a Monad is supposed to do and how it supposedly works.) All that said, I did go out of my way to make sure that Haskell has representation at the Supercomputing '08 "Bridging The Programmability Gap" workshop, since I personally think it has some good contributions to make in the area of programming symmetric and hybrid multicore. -scooter _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
