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Comment by nunobrito | Hacker News Reader

I was recently working with a university department (I'm a business). They developed this interesting software in Haskell. Their developer quit job for something better, it took months looking for a replacement but still nobody wanted to pick up this code. That project just ended up being rewritten in Java so we could get on with development.

That's life folks. Some people just need to build products and get them to market for paying salaries and supporting their family. If you ask me what is bad about Haskell, it is the difficulty in finding developers and difficulty on making other developers to work with apps written in Haskell.

I don't program in Haskell, I have people doing the programming side (don't get me wrong, I wrote 100k LOC in Java over the 12 months) and if I ask other developers around here to learn Haskell, it is difficult to get any enthusiasm.

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"Some people just need to build products and get them to market for paying salaries and supporting their family." Which is perfectly possible with Haskell. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR3Jirqk6W8

"if I ask other developers around here to learn Haskell, it is difficult to get any enthusiasm." What you are saying is that you have developers who are not willing to learn new technologies. It is one thing to say that they've spent some time studying it and decided that it wasn't a good fit for the problem they are working on, it is a completely different thing to say that they don't know it and are not interested in learning something new and don't want to hear about it. I would question the quality of such developers.

"If you ask me what is bad about Haskell, it is the difficulty in finding developers and difficulty on making other developers to work with apps written in Haskell."

This makes me wonder even more what's wrong with it! I doubt the learning curve is scaring THAT many people away, since employable programmers already demonstrated a willingness to learn hard things. It seems to me that there must be something bad I don't know about the language.

> there must be something bad I don't know about the language.

No, there isn't. People are just scared because of what they hear from others who failed at learning it, and who now say negative things about the language to feel better about themselves. People who fail to learn it are too entrenched in another paradigm or aren't able to think abstractly enough. It's not the language's fault. It might be partly because they read the wrong learning materials.

> it took months looking for a replacement but still nobody wanted to pick up this code

> and if I ask other developers around here to learn Haskell, it is difficult to get any enthusiasm

Sorry, it does not seem to be Haskell the problem, but the people.

> If you ask me what is bad about Haskell, it is the difficulty in finding developers and difficulty on making other developers to work with apps written in Haskell.

For this, I suggest few solutions: (1) http://www.haskellers.com/users (2) http://careers.stackoverflow.com/employer (3) http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell (4) https://wiki.haskell.org/Mailing_lists (5) #haskell at Freenode

In the extreme case, I would go for https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell_in_industry and https://github.com/commercialhaskell/commercialhaskell looking for a freelancer or a consulting company focused on Haskell.

Seriously, I don't think those were strong arguments, although I totally understand the difference in finding a Java developer versus a Haskell one.

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