Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskellers.com profiles: advice requested

On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 8:41 AM, Vo Minh Thu wrote:

2010/10/7 Michael Snoyman :

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On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 8:14 PM, Brent Yorgey wrote:

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One (slightly off-topic) question: at the top of the site it says "the meeting place for professional Haskell programmers".  Is this supposed to be geared towards Haskell programmers who get paid (or want to get paid) to write Haskell?  If so, fine; if not, in my opinion the word "professional" ought to be dropped.

The fact is that the site has two functions: on the one hand, it's simply a social network for anyone connected to the Haskell world. In that sense, the word "professional" is inaccurate. However, the second function is to encourage Haskell usage in industry, by showing a large number of highly qualified Haskell programmers. In this sense, the word professional is very apt.

I hope the word professional isn't scaring off the hobbyists; I would definitely want them to be signing up on the site as well. But as far as the "marketing" of the site goes, I think our main goal should be impressing industry.

Hi,

Does this mean it is possible to accurately distinct a hobbyist and a highly qualified professional within the site?

No. Firstly, there can be a very fine line between hobbyist and professional. At my previous job, I did 95% of my coding and SAS and VBA (the lovely insurance industry). However, they had one project where we needed fast parsing of large binary files and I used Haskell for it. I would have considered myself at the time a Haskell hobbyist, but it's not really clear. Secondly, the only information which is verified on the Haskellers site right now is email address. I have plans to add badges so that people can be verified, but I'm hesitant to do so right now. You can get an idea of how "professional" a Haskeller someone is right now based on their years of experience and their description field. Michael