We could/should probably all just start our own collective (corporate) entity to produce software, based on the premises that 1) software built with Haskell will be more robust, and 2) software built by developers who have an affinity and aptitude for this language will tend to write better software. When the products themselves gain a positive reputation with the general public, then the corporation itself and those invested will benefit. .... cheers heard across the world .... A U.S. president would probably subsidize such a job-creating endeavor too! Nay-sayers are probably predominately composed of those who do not understand it or its benefits.
Date: Wed, 10 Feb 2010 19:26:22 +0000 From: andrewcoppin@btinternet.com To: haskell-cafe@haskell.org Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] How many "Haskell Engineer I/II/III"s are there?
Jason Dusek wrote:
Although I'm fond of Haskell, in practice I am not a Haskell programmer -- I'm paid for Ruby and Bourne shell programming.
Many of the jobs posted on this list end up being jobs for people who appreciate Haskell but will work in C# or O'Caml or some-such.
I wonder how many people actually write Haskell, principally or exclusively, at work?
I usually estimate the answer to this question by looking up how many employees WellTyped.com and Galois.com have between them, under the simplifying assumption that the number of other people using Haskell is probably so utterly insignificant that it doesn't matter.
I'd love to see Haskell become popular, but it doesn't seem to be in any rush to happen just yet. (Then again, I gather 10 years ago things were far, far worse than they are today...)
Some people (especially C programmers) have tried to tell me that Haskell is too slow. Others have claimed it's too incomprehensible. "People inherantly thing sequentially, not set-theoretically" they say. (Last time I checked, nobody's complaining about SQL being unintuitive...) "People don't think recursively" is another commonly-sited objection. Still others point out that Haskell is a *pure* functional language, and all the most popular languages are hybrids. Eiffel is a pure-OO language, but the hybrids like Java and C++ far vastly more popular. I myself might point out the comparative immaturity of things on Windows (the single biggest target platform on the market), and the rough edges on tools like Darcs, Haddock and Cabal. If enough people become interested, all these things could (and hopefully would) be fixed. It's a question of whether we reach the necessary critical mass or not...
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