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Comment by mynegation | Hacker News Reader

As a math major, programmer and musical snob (I do hate jazz though) I figured that there are people who love complexity and nuance and their brain lights up with sense of awe getting into Haskell, jazz, and pure math. And there are people who (1) do not necessarily enjoy complexity and nuance that much and just want to get the job done and (2) hate us, pesky snobs (we can be pretty annoying).

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Much real-world software development is pretty complex, but experienced developers understands complexity is the beast to be tamed, not a goal to be achieved.

Haskell fans seem to delight in making simple problems complex rather than complex problems simple.

> Haskell fans seem to delight in making simple problem complex rather than complex problems simple.

That’s a reductive way of talking about a group of people. Is that from your personal experience with Haskell fans?

My personal experience with Haskell fans doesn’t match that at all. The Haskell fans I meet tend to be reasonably pragmatic, but care more about correctness. There are some who do research, but they acknowledge that research doesn’t always yield practical advancements. The Haskell fans I know will acknowledge that Haskell is not most people’s first choice for a language, and that one of the main benefits of Haskell is to yield insights that can be ported to other languages.

There used to be a lot of smug Haskell users here 10 years ago. Not sure what happened to those, you don't see it any longer as you say.

You also get a different section of programmers on HN and Reddit. You might think of Rust users as annoying evangelists, if you base your assessment on HN comments. My interactions with Rust users in-person differs wildly from interactions online.

From what I've seen, most of them moved to Rust.

That was a way back too, when The Rust Strike Force roamed these halls.

Rust is now approaching mainstream, if it isn't there already.

- "Haskell fans seem to delight in making simple problems complex rather than complex problems simple."

Could be an observational bias. I think the silent majority are quietly using the simple, easy parts of Haskell to solve problems in simple ways, and aren't tweeting about it. Because it's boring.

This could very well be the case. My observation is based on online writings.

I apologize to all pragmatic Haskell fans for the unfair generalization!

To continue the jazz comparison, I guess this would be the competent jazz trio knocking out by the book jazz standards in the corner of a bar. They'll probably never make it big or become famous, and most people will forget about them quickly enough, but they'll have a steady stream of gigs and just about everybody there will be happy enough listening to them in the background and have a good time.

You got Haskell fans mixed up with Enterprise Java Architects.

Haskell fans like neatness and good type systems. EJAs like to torture people, with verbosity and cumbersome abstractions.

Last time I used it, Cabal was a giant mess and a lot of the packages on Hackage didn't work.

I like the idea of Unison. Would be good to see a normal language using hashed functions to avoid recompilation.

Cabal has never treated me poorly, though broken packages do happen (usually due to unnecessarily restrictive upper version bounds on libraries - unpack and fix the .cabal, add directory as extra-dep, move on with your day).

For the last long while, though, Stackage (versioned repository of packages that build together under a fixed computer version) and stack fix this problem. It's one of the things I miss when I use other packages/build managers from other languages.

Can't edit, but:

s/computer/compiler/

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