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Comment by transfire | Hacker News Reader

A really great example of why Haskell will be forever relegated to academic circles.

Your prediction is already false. It's extra-silly coming in the same week that Facebook open-sourced a piece of their own infrastructure written in Haskell.

And I'm sure the high frequency traders using it would chuckle to hear that they are "academics".

Why do you say that? Your comment seems to be entirely negative, and you seem to have seen something that I haven't. Please can you expand on it?

In particular, the cynical part of my mind wonders if it's simply because you can't read the code, and because of that haven't really bothered to follow the argument. I'm sure you must have deeper reasons that that, and I, for one, would appreciate an explanation of your reasoning.

As a newcomer to Haskell may I offer an explanation: the article is full of jargon and thus hard to follow.

That's definitely a valid criticism of the article, but not really an explanation for the OP's post AFAICT.

Yes, it assumes some knowledge of the language. But imagine if every article about, say, Ruby, had to explain things in a way that someone who'd only ever seen C would understand? Authors would be hamstrung, unable to talk about things at any level other than the most elementary.

If you're going to talk about the power of a language you have to allow the use of language that talks about that power. To talk about what you can do in Haskell beyond toy problems you need to allow people to use more than just toy language.

If readers aren't willing to do any work, its tough to help them learn anything new.

It doesn't just assume knowledge of the language though. Assuming knowledge of Applicative, Monad and Functor is fine but as the current top comment says there is a lot more than that. Most of which you wouldn't find in a normal Haskell tutorial/article

No, exactly. This is not a beginner tutorial - there are plenty of those. This is for people who have already acquired some knowledge of the language. It's an intermediate article for those looking to move beyond the toy programs solving toy problems usually presented.

Author here: the concept of `Applicative`s is unique to Haskell and has no parallel in other programming languages. This makes the post difficult to write to a broad audience. Instead, I just tried to show the neat things you could do with `Applicative`s to try to entice people to learn more about them.

I respectfully suggest that Applicative is not what makes this article hard to understand. I agree with thinkpad20 here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7894258

I don't think it's unique to Haskell. The Scalaz library for Scala also provides Applicative:

https://github.com/scalaz/scalaz/blob/scalaz-seven/core/src/...

Do they differ in some drastic way? (Note: I'm not super familiar with the Haskell version.)

Oh, I wasn't aware Scalaz had applicative. Then I stand corrected.

I don't think a beginner would be in a position to judge what is 'jargon' and what is essential terminology.

...Haskell will be forever relegated to academic circles.

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BlubParadox

There's a difference between "academic" and "clever".

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