Bayley, Alistair wrote:
Well, wouldn't it be best to define your audience first? At the risk of
alienating Pythonistas...
The Python home page is very much snake oil (as Albert points out). But
it appears that they're aiming squarely at the average gormless
C/C++/VB/Java drone who's heard a bit about some exciting dynamic
language called "python". And I think they do a pretty good job at
marketing to this segment.
So the question becomes: do you want to attract/seduce this kind of
programmer? Let's assume the answer is yes :-)
Um... that assumpion troubles me.
Learning Haskell requires a fairly serious investment of mental energy.
The language is completely unlike anything else in the mainstream. (I
don't think Lisp or Erlang count as "mainstream" quite yet.) How many
coders who spend their days churning out boiler-plate Java or VB are
going to bother with all that effort? Few, I would think. Besides,
currently Haskell pretty much sucks at all the things Java and VB are
good at. (Web development, playing with databases, talking to native
applications, building complex GUIs, etc. Sure, it can all be done. But
it's much harder than in Java or VB...)
I think if we want to get anywhere we need to look at targeting people
whom Haskell actually has something to offer. Now, if I could just
figure out who those are... :-/
PS. Let's *not* mention Lisp, Erlang, Clean et al, eh? They're all
already wildly more popular than Haskell, so let's not make it any worse...
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