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Comment by krisoft | Hacker News Reader

> it's mostly due to socio-historical accident. It's not because the languages are particularly difficult or arcane, it's mainly because people don't already know it, and people don't like to learn to do things differently

I beg to differ. I studied compsci BSC at an eastern european university. The professors decided to test that theory and decided to introduce programing to everyone in our program through Haskell. Every year about 500 new students were thaught Haskell. I don’t know a single one of us who stuck with it. Probably there are a few odd ones, but if it were only a question of familiarity you would expect that more people from there would keep programing in it.

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Our uni taught us Haskell, Prolog, C and Java. All very intensive. First it was C, then Haskell & Prolog and then Java. When I came out of uni, I wanted to use Prolog & Haskell for everything, but jobs were only in Java and C. Don’t think it’s a matter or liking them or being more productive in them; you need to earn a living.

That's a response to a slightly different question. Your answer makes it clear that exposing students to a language isn't enough to make them take up a language. The original point was that Haskell isn't per se inaccessible.

It's inaccessible because it's difficult and arcane compared to languages like Python, especially at the beginner levels when you are still trying to figure out how a for-loop works, and what are variables, and so on.

OK, but now we're back full circle, and you're disagreeing with both epgui https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34542953 and krisoft https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34544130

Yeah, of course, I am. I don't see what that has to do with anything. So my point is only valid if I support someone else?

A lot of us here have read "Learn You A Haskell for a Great Good". We've used it.

It's not a socio-historical incident, and it's not just beginners who struggle with the language either.

> Yeah, of course, I am. I don't see what that has to do with anything. So my point is only valid if I support someone else?

Your point is perfectly valid. I'm just saying the thread has just become a sequence of assertions and not particularly enlightening.

If it was accessible, then exposing students to it would be enough to make them take it up, no?

No? It may not be suited to their applications (wrong tooling / libraries ), or their collaborators may not use it, or they might simply not like it

I have a similar experience at Oxford. However, the introduction course doesn't even cover IO monad and all of our code are run in repl. No wonder the students regard Haskell as impractical as they did not even write a full program in it.

Still, if they'd found that Haskell was much easier or more productive to use than other programming languages for simple computational tasks, you'd think a few of them might have googled 'how do do IO in Haskell' and gone from there.

That seems to be getting things backwards. How could they find it easier or more productive if they haven't even done IO yet?

I would say the productivity gains of Haskell are actually most transparently obvious in the case of the sort of toy algorithmic code you're likely to be writing in a compsci class.

OK. And I would say the productivity gains of Haskell are most transparently obvious in the case of the sort of highly complex, stateful, I/O-interacting code you're likely to be writing for a successful tech company.

This doesn’t match my personal experience (having worked on a Haskell web app professionally for a couple of years). GHC does have some cool features like STM, but typical stateful code tends not to be radially more concise or easier to write in Haskell than in other high level languages (compared to, say, code for traversing a binary tree, or implementing a parser combinator library). Others may have different experiences.

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