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Comment by quickthrower2 | Hacker News Reader

Haskell is a funny beast because I get a lot of joy from “conquering” the next level up (like a game) but in terms of productivity I’m not getting a lot done. OTOH in more pedestrian languages I’m using that brain BHP on getting stuff done. I really got into the Haskell thing a while back, going to meetups etc. but getting a job using Haskell is hard unless you’ve got experience already and want to take a pay cut.

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Agreed - it certainly is rewarding in itself to get to the next level, but that's precisely it: the means become ends in themselves. I stopped using stuff like Arch Linux a while back for similar reasons.

Yep. Tools like Docker and Kubernetes on the other hand, I have found they give you a nice amount of leverage for much easier to understand concepts. In a similar "Workhorse" category I would put Git and Typescript. All of these require some effort to get to know, but they pay off nicely in terms of productivity.

Haskell is a pretty decent general purpose programming language, and if used well you can produce nice programs, but the problem is that the library you need will use some clever type system stuff and suddenly you are spending hours trying to understand how it all works.

For example I'd be happy doing a lot of stuff in the IO monad with some pure bits to the side where needed. Avoid the free monads, monad transformers, type classes and all that jazz. So use it like an imperative language for the most part.

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