Hacker News Reader

Comment by nousernamesleft | Hacker News Reader

>The fact that there is so much maths talk surrounding Haskell really doesn't help

Nor does it hurt. It only provides something for people to point to while they say "look, people are talking about something I am not interested in, therefore haskell is too hard and I shouldn't bother trying".

>And I've watched many, many discussions about Haskell go into deep arguments about category theory

You are not required to participate in any discussions you don't want to participate in.

>I want to write a program

So do it? The whole point of my post is that it is perfectly simple to do so. If a non-programmer can teach herself haskell and be productive with it, there's no reason a programmer can't.

View on HN

> So do it?

A huge part of a programming language is, in fact, its community. I'd say that's more important than the language itself; any given feature can and will be replicated, but the community cannot be.

I cannot get the maximum out of Haskell if I cannot get involved in its community, which is heavily CS-oriented.

If you don't want to learn haskell then don't. It is the weird insistence on making up ridiculous excuses that I have a problem with. Making up a strawman version of "the haskell community" is entirely unnecessary. Once again, a web designer with no CS education of any sort can do it without any problems at all. Your excuse is obviously baloney.

It's unclear to me whether you want "to write a program" or to "get the maximum out of Haskell". Those are two very different goals.

The thing is, I can write a program in any language. The reason for learning a new language would be to learn a new way of thinking, to "get the maximum out of it". If I can't get involved in its community, I can't do that properly.

Have you interacted with the Haskell community? The Haskell community is made up of individuals who come to Haskell from a variety of different backgrounds. Yes there are a lot of Computer Scientists using Haskell, but not all of us are programming languages PhDs. There are people who are interested in designing hardware and build HDLs in Haskell. There are others who use it for its correctness and performance characteristics when building large scale systems. Some are just doing web development. The community is probably one of the most helpful and friendly as well. The people in the IRC channel are always ready to help and encourage new comers with resources and advice. I have had a much better experience in #haskell them I ever had in #ruby, and usually the explanations are correct and clear.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com