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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Tough love: because Haskell proponents spend all their time ruminating on the beauty and purity of their preferred language instead of writing useful and novel software.

No one whines about why, say, coffeescript is used so little in the industry. They just go out and use it.

(Edit: to be clear, I'm not comparing coffeescript and Haskell as languages. I'm comparing the cultures around them. One "team" has a new toy and is excitedly building stuff with it; there's now a whole community of great stuff available with real applications. The other... has some interesting tools available if you look, but no energy. And they spend their time wondering why and NOT excitedly building stuff.)

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I write useful and novel software. I'm doing that right now in Haskell.

It's also deployed to Heroku. You wouldn't know it's written in Haskell if I didn't tell you.

Saying that X (CoffeeScript) proponents make more useful/novel software than Y (Haskell) proponents is pretty crazy.

I said no such thing. I said coffeescript proponents don't whine about it. There's a culture in mainstream open source about "getting things done". People make stuff and show it off, and the value is what they made, not how they did it.

Haskell lacks that culture, as evidenced by the premise behind this question.

Haskell may lack the promotional aspect.

I'm a casual Haskell enthusiast and have no trouble finding interesting useful Haskell apps. But that may be because I now know where to look. Or have taken the time to find things.

So Haskell has a culture of making things but may lack the "show it off" part.

Should I be reading something out of this comment other than a totally ridiculous insult? I would flag it and move on if it wasn't coming from someone whose contributions I normally enjoy.

- You seem to be saying that Haskell people are per capita less productive (or more "whiny?") than people writing in other languages. I have no idea why you think this is true, because I don't know any good way to even find out how many people know Haskell. Please show even the slightest bit of evidence.

- Are you kidding me? Go Google "coffeescript usage" (better yet: "why coffeescript") and see page after page of people writing why they're using Coffeescript, why they're not using Coffeescript, asking if anyone else is using Coffeescript, telling people to use Coffeescript, ad infinitum. People like to talk about who is using every single piece of technology on this planet.

Not less per capita, but far far less capita.

The meaning of "tough love" is that I'm trying to provide some needed advice, which I recognize in advance may be misinterpreted as an insult. I meant it sincerely.

I don't care whether or not people "talk about" Haskell, that's not my point at all. People will start using it (which is the answer to the linked question) when Haskell starts doing things that are better than what is available elsewhere. It isn't.

If it's a better environment for doing, say, MVC web frameworks then make something that competes with rails. If it's faster than C (I hear this a lot), then write some system middleware that clearly improves on the existing stuff. And stop asking why people aren't using it!

Kind of an unfair comparision... Coffeescript compiles to Javascript. Sure, GHC Haskell might have once compiled to C but no one was expected to actually read the C code.

Reading the Javascript code is pretty much unavoidable with Coffeescript because debugging utilities don't exist for it at all.

I know quite a few people that use Scala in place of Haskell just because it runs on the JVM.

Interoperability matters.

So it's an unfair comparison in favor of Coffeescript because Coffeescript has inadequate tools? I don't see the rationale here. Especially since the vast majority of javascript out there is minified, especially when it has been generated by something like Coffeescript. Nobody is expected to actually read the minified code.

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