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Comment by Nadya | Hacker News Reader

It has a pretty high learning curve. Not entirely fault of Haskell, but more that people find functional programming to be difficult, to say the least.

Then there is the "Chicken & Egg problem" behind libraries and adoption rate.

  1. High Learning Curve = Lower adoption rate
  2. Low adoption rate = Less people making libraries
  3. Less Libraries = Less People want to use Haskell - Goto 2

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https://hackage.haskell.org/packages/

I think there are plenty of libraries.

I also think what people call "high learning curve" is more "this is so different from the good ol' OOP that I've been doing for the past decade".

Functional programming is not hard, it is actually very easy to learn as a first paradigm. It becomes more complicated when one has experience with a different paradigm and has to un-learn their habits to learn new ones.

In fairness, Haskell is still complicated compared to other functional languages, such as the ML family (F# and OCaml included) and Erlang. Might be because of its purity.

complicated is a very overloaded term, you'll have to communicate what complicated is to you before we can meaningfully compare Haskell vs other ML family.

Hmm, well I don't mean "why don't more people use it". I understand it looks weird and difficult at first. What I'm more interested in is, for people who have used Haskell for a few projects, what don't they like about it?

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