Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell's "historical futurism" needs better writing, not better tools

On Fri, Sep 17, 2021 at 06:54:50PM +0900, Michael Turner wrote:

On Fri, Sep 17, 2021 at 4:58 PM Tom Ellis wrote:

...

Michael, I have an offer for you (in fact two):

1. I will collaborate with you to produce the guide to Haskell's evaluation that *you* would want to read.

2. I will collaborate with you to write the NLP tool that you want to write in Haskell.

I think if I write anything long, it would first have to be my "Haskell in Plain English: A Guide for Lexical Semanticists."

Fair enough.

...

I can't do these without collaborating with someone like you. I simply don't know what someone else wants to read.

So much of good writing is just figuring out an audience. As I wrote to Viktor above, the section he presented to me in case I had trouble with it could be absolutely ideal for someone with more grounding. They could admire the sentence I struggled with, for how it encapsulates their understanding while refreshing their memory.

Yes indeed. The audience that I write for is myself since that's the audience I know. I am interested in writing for a more general audience but I don't have motivation at the moment to do so without a member of that general audience on the team.

I'm not sure that gearing a piece toward what /I/ would like to read is a much bigger audience

I suspect the group of people who are interested in yet frustrated by Haskell is *far* bigger than the group of people who are already familiar with Haskell!

If I had to suggest an approach you could try on your own, it would be this:

Thank you for the suggestion. I will bear it in mind if I decide to tackle this in the future. Tom