Comment by WastingMyTime89 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WastingMyTime89 | Hacker News Reader

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WastingMyTime89

Oh but I know why they choose it. They want to geek out and feel smart.

Haskell is somewhat unique regarding modern programming language in that it was created as a research project on programming language. Most other languages emerge as a solution to an engineering problem: C for Unix, Rust for Servo, Ocaml for Coq.

If you allow me an analogy, a good programming language and its community starts wanting to build a great building and thinking their scaffolding technoly is inadequate. They then build better scaffolding as they are buildinh their building.

Haskell started thinking they had a really cool way to build a scaffold and the community is still more interested in building scaffolding than actually using them. That's why there are more lense libraries than useful software built using Haskell.

> They want to geek out and feel smart.

Jesus Christ, I am so sick of you and all the people like you who repeat this lie. I've invested a lot of time learning about category theory, domain theory, type theory, etc. so I could become the best version of myself as a programmer, and I have seen very real benefit from this investment. Only to have you and these other people in HN tell me I'm just trying to "feel smart". Your arrogance is so off-putting to me.

When did HN become so anti-intellectual? If you don't understand something, then either learn it or don't—but you don't need to bash other people for their own efforts.

> Only to have you and these other people in HN tell me I'm just trying to "feel smart". Your arrogance is so off-putting to me.

When did HN become so anti-intellectual? If you don't understand something, then either learn it or don't—but you don't need to bash other people for their own efforts.

Listen, I have both an advanced degree in mathematics where I mostly did algebra and I have work for large software projects with hard constraints in the aerospace industry. I have nothing about people learning category theory. It's an interesting intellectual endeavour but people who think they are learning domain theory and category theory in order to be better engineers are just dicking around. It's not anti-intellectualism. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of what and where the problem actually is. Actually this last sentence sums up my issue with Haskell pretty well now that I think about it.

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