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Comment by ipnon | Hacker News Reader

Learning Agda and later Haskell is what my grandfather would call "character building." It was awful and confusing and was seemingly useless until I realized I could intuitively write certain algorithms that my colleagues struggled with.

And what a beauty it is! How many languages can you do the same thing in so many different, humorous ways? Each one expresses somehow the nature of the programmer who wrote them. Haskell is the art of computer programming at some of its finest.

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You're absolutely right. The only problem with art is that art doesn't produce what is actually needed for survival (like food or practical engineering solutions), hence promoting Haskell outside of art/research is ultimately a fool's errand. But damn it is pleasant.

except it works perfectly fine for practical engineering solutions soooo ??

They already said it was helping them outside Haskell. I can confirm that my long affair with Haskell (and I still use it for private projects) did so as well.

On the other hand, it also makes for an often frustrating experience of "this would be so much simpler/easier if it were Haskell or at least had x", where x could be algebraic data types, higher order types, Monads, Applicative Functors, dependent types, laziness, and so on and so on...

EDIT: Addendum: Rust scratches some of that itch and seems more and more accepted in the workforce world, so at least that's a good direction we're moving towards.

It is a very good training/shaping tool, like mathematical analysis or modern logic. You'll benefit even if you never see an integral in the "real world". I think it should be taught in all respectable universities.

Haskell powers pandoc, a couple of trading firms, and more and more systems at FB and Google.

I don’t know if any of those things are practical but some are useful and some make money ;)

OCaml is also instructive. It’s a little more similar to “industry languages” but definitely close to Haskell; it also has reasonably broad adoption.

TontineTrust (https://tontine.com) uses Haskell for a practical engineering solution which ensures the survival of retirees that live a long life.

Your parents (and the older version of you) that are facing the 33%+ probability of running out of money in old age will agree that solving such a problem is most definitely not a fool's errand.

Otherwise fully agree.

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