
FWIW to the discussion about changing the main page, I was reading the CUFP paper and I saw some germane comments (and the writer is apparently one Noel Welsh, whose name I don't see in the thread); the context is a discussion (pg 17) of various members or potential members of the Haskell community and how supported they are: "What are the needs of the potential programmer? People program to solve prob- lems; so there had better be a clear statement of what kinds of problem the language is good for. The Python community does a good job of this on python.org: "Python is a dynamic object-oriented programming language that can be used for many kinds of software development. It offers strong support for integration with other languages and tools, comes with extensive standard libraries, and can be learned in a few days." Compare this with the equivalent from haskell.org: "Haskell is a general purpose, purely functional programming language featuring static typing, higher-order functions, polymorphism, type classes, and monadic effects. Haskell compilers are freely available for almost any computer." If you understand all that, you don't need to be here: you're already a Haskell programmer." -- gwern