I haven't been able to view Andrew Boardman's video so far, but I gather from the summary that he feels the solution to the most pressing problem -- growth through fostering newbies -- is simply . . . better tools. I beg to differ, as a newbie who is now struggling with the revival of some Haskell code only with a feeling of claustrophobia. Where is this incredible feeling of freedom I was promised? At the top of the learning curve. And it feels like a Sisyphean slope -- the boulder stops, when I lay off learning, and then slowly starts to roll down under the gravitational force of memory decay. The real problem is that the writing sucks. Not all of it -- and some contributors to the community are stellar writers, even if, in the snarkish commentary they write about Haskell and the community, I don't quite get all the jokes. But speaking as a contributor to the Haskell.org wiki -- to which I contribute at times out of hope that clarifying points I understand will also lead to more clarity for myself -- I have to say it: the writing sucks. Why does it suck? Well, there are several syndromes. One is to think that Haskell is so incredibly good and pure and elementally profound that one must start conceptually from scratch. (I've actually been curtly informed on the beginners' list -- yes, the beginner' list! -- that my problems of comprehension can be solved simply: "Learn lambda calculus.") I've had a book recommended to me whose author had such pretensions to writing in a way that was easily foundational that he actually claimed his book could teach you Haskell even if you have no programming experience at all. Now, in practical marketing terms, that's just silly: such an approach addresses a minuscule fraction of the book's potential audience. If you've heard of Haskell as a programming language, you're probably software-multilingual already. But in practical pedagogical terms, it's also a little ridiculous. Your average reader (already a programmer) would be better served by a comparative approach: Here's how to say something in a couple of other programming languages, here's how to say something roughly equivalent in Haskell -- BUT, here's how it's subtly different in Haskell. Here's how Haskell makes something easier (at least perhaps in being more concise, if the Haskell is more concise) but also conferring useful leverage where Haskell might otherwise seem unnecessarily verbose. The problem of better writing is ultimately social, I believe. I have a friend who's a tenured professor at Columbia University, who has used Haskell in courses, who praises Haskell for how it makes students think a little more clearly about how to structure software. However, his final verdict is this: Functional programming is a cult. Now, he's a unabashedly abrasive type. (Just ask him, he'll tell you.) And that verdict IS a little over the top. But I have to say, my impression of the community is that there are Founder demi-gods praised even though they leave something to be desired in how articulate and clear they are for newbies, even when claiming to be addressing newbies, while the language itself seems to be somewhat an object of worship. How can the writing be better? Well, here's a clue: Simon Peyton-Jones, somewhere in a talk where he was his usual vibrant self (but where the audience was clearly stunned and intimidated into silence even though he'd invited people to interrupt with questions) said that F# had settled on the term "workflow" instead of "monad", and he felt this was wise. Workflow? Workflow!? My still-feeble understanding of monads took a leap forward, because suddenly I had a motivation for them: abstraction of the idea of a workflow. Could it be that something as simple as Maybe was a kind of "degenerate case" of a "workflow abstraction"? I felt massively encouraged that I might finally figure out how great monads were. Which is not to say that I have. Writers: you need to stop speaking your own obscure little dialect of "programmer English". If you're not aware that you are, become more self-aware. If you ARE aware of it, become aware of how snobbish or pointlessly mysterious you sound. And if you do become aware of how you sound, but don't care, ask yourself: if the goal now is to spread Haskell and help it flourish, isn't your attitude more of a hindrance than a help? Tools? That's not the front I'd pick. Because I hit a glitch in getting VScode to work under Windows 10 (yes, cue the snobbery), I backed off to github bash and vim. And you know what? It's fine. Sorry if my knuckles seem to be dragging on the floor, but I'm from the Stone Age of Unix v7 command line and Bill Joy's original vi. I'd like nicer tools. But they aren't likely to help me with Haskell. What's not fine: half the time, I can't figure out the error messages from GHC, and a dismaying portion of the time, I can't figure out the language documentation. And since the concepts are seldom described in concrete enough and time-honored programming language terms (by comparison to other programming languages) they often don't really stick. It's like my Sysiphean boulder has been pre-greased -- if I stop pushing (hard enough with all the abstraction grease on it), it starts to slide even before it rolls, whenever I leave off coding in Haskell for any length of time. Sorry for not writing better email here -- my sentences get rather long and tortuous when I rant. But not sorry for ranting. You say the solution to a tool adoption problem (getting more people to use Haskell) is yet more tools written in Haskell, for your favorite language, Haskell? No. The failure here is a failure to communicate. Regards, Michael Turner Executive Director Project Persephone 1-25-33 Takadanobaba Shinjuku-ku Tokyo 169-0075 Mobile: +81 (90) 5203-8682 turner@projectpersephone.org Understand - http://www.projectpersephone.org/ Join - http://www.facebook.com/groups/ProjectPersephone/ Donate - http://www.patreon.com/ProjectPersephone Volunteer - https://github.com/ProjectPersephone "Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry