Jason Bailey wrote:
No offense but those are just catch phrases. They can support a justification but won't work as a justification in its own right.
Here are some questions that I would expect to get from business.
Q:"What have I heard about this technology?" A: Probably nothing. Haskell isn't very well known in the programming community (out of 6 co-workers asked, one had used Haskell in a single college class), let alone the business community. Business has become very wary about accepting technologies that are obscure.
At Imperial College (top european science and technology university) all DOC undergradutes taught Haskell as main teaching language - so no shortage of top-quality trained graduates...
Q:"What can I do with this language that I can't do now?" A:Well nothing. It can certainly do some things better then the current languages out there, but its just another general purpose language.
Get static guarantees that a program won't crash... programs can be buffer-overflow proof (list based strings) and more reliable
Q:"Will it require training?" A: Oh yes, we're talking about a different way of looking at programs. On the surface level it should be fairly easy to pick up but it will take some time before the engineers are able to produce decent work. Oh and there are no training classes we can send people to. They will have to learn on their own.
See answer to 1
Q:"Whats the market like for Haskell programmers?" A: Well there isn't one. Which means that if business was going to advertise for someone with haskell programming knowledge they are going to end some spending a premium on them.
See answer to 1
Q:"Why should we support yet another programming language?" A: Because this is a better language. (Wouldn't work as an answer but I would give it a try. )
Its not yet another programming language - it's the future and you don't want to be left behind... Keean.