Hello Antonio, Saturday, August 5, 2006, 7:07:17 PM, you wrote:

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But there must be a way to populize Haskell!

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What for?

On the other hand, individuals that need to belong to an elite, and the RTFM crowd, will experience a further frustration to feed their insecure personality.

there is an interesting psychotherapy procedure. if one can't raise some own ability, he can try instead to lower it. such attempts can help to understand how this ability can be raised so i propose opposite game: how can we decrease Haskell popularity? :) -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com

On 8/5/06, Piotr Kalinowski wrote:

Yes, yes. I'm simply not sure if making changes only to reach more and more people is good.

These changes are good as long as they possibly add something valuable beside popularity and they don't introduce significant downsides. My point was that the act of striving to increase the popularity of one's favourite language, it is neither a negative nor an unnatural pursuit. I agree though that it should be done intelligently and with a broader aim in mind.

I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean. Would you care to elaborate on it?

Sure. I meant that among small communities some individuals feel "special" for being part of these elite groups. It's a way to feel different, better, or something along these lines. Therefore they are afraid of any attempt to considerably increase the popularity of their group, because in their minds they would loose their special status (they can't brag they're Haskell hackers if the rest of the world programs in Haskell as well). Regards, Antonio -- My Ruby blog: http://antoniocangiano.com My Italian community: http://www.visualcsharp.it

On 06/08/06, Kaveh Shahbazian wrote:

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how can we decrease Haskell popularity?

Why? Because someone must prevent mean programmers to try Haskell? Or it is a bit of old holy codex? Or maybe I must feal tired of hearing newbies questions?

No, no. He meant a mental exercise. You think how you can decrease popularity. And the you gain insight what not to do. And perhaps you can increase the popularity doing the exact opposite. Regards, -- Intelligence is like a river: the deeper it is, the less noise it makes

Hello Kaveh, Sunday, August 6, 2006, 12:54:01 PM, you wrote:

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how can we decrease Haskell popularity?

Why? Because someone must prevent mean programmers to try Haskell? Or it is a bit of old holy codex? Or maybe I must feal tired of hearing newbies questions?

all the three and especially the last one: i hate answering stupid novices questions, especially at Friday's evening! :D moreover, it's more exciting game than debating how to raise popularity. i've just reread Wadler's paper i mentioned and tend to somewhat disagree with him: Wadler wrote that FP is unpopular not because average programmer "stupidity". I can agree that FP by _itself_ don't need light brains. In fact, if i will sometime teach a beginner programmers, the first language i will show to him will be a functional or logic one - they are most close to the human's nature of thinking but current FP languages is very far from the basic FP concepts! may be because they was developed by scientists, but they involve very complex concepts to accomplish the everyday tasks. using of monads just to organize IO is best-known example so, imaging that i will lead some young programmers with average brains (and i had sich experience using C++) i'm not sure that FP language will be equally easy to master as OOP ones on the other side, it's highly possible that the real cause is that during high school courses students are teached to think in imperative style. developing the better methodologies of FP teaching (or may be they are already developed - i don't read "School of FP", for example) may change this situation, but at least now i think it's harder to teach FP programmers than OOP ones. on the other side, this very high level of FP paradigms makes the Haskell interesting for experienced programmers who just want to break their minds :) but this has nothing common with business :D -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com

Hello Kaveh, Sunday, August 6, 2006, 5:40:26 PM, you wrote:

I think we need a subset of haskell as a new language (or as a developing pattern) to work with and teach and learn more easily as you have mentioned.

it called Helium :) but in general problem is what Haskell's way to deal with problems is to find most general and abstract solution, such as enclosing monads just for doing I/O. it's great for programmers interesting in raising their programming languages knowledge (i usually study several new languages each year, so Haskell with all its extensions partially replaces my need in new interesting languages ;) ) but can be nightmare for 99% of programmers. after all, they need to learn many many other things besides of language tricks interesting for souls like me

I had read a text about mathematics which was something like this : "New mathematic theories does not populize because of their fabiolus logical theorems, but because of death of elder mathematicians and forging a new folk of them that were rised by new theories.".

that's true for any science (recall for example Freud's story) and moreover for any ideology (Moses drived Hebrews over the desert for 40 years just in order that Jews that born in slavery was died)

That is usefull to have in mind. (And because of that, maybe there is no force to compele someone to disturbe his mind on a peacfull friday afternoon! ;) ) Anyway the point is developing more efficient and easily; instead of serving marketing features of languages.

that is entirely different question. while Haskell is rare bird, _i_ can't use it in commercial environment. as one manager said "i can easily find 10 C++ programmers. but where i will find 3 Haskell developers?" ;)

And there must be - and will be - someone (or some will) to makes things better. "very high level of FP" in Haskell is good but there is no lower level of them somewhere else. So almost the only choice for a useful FP environment is Haskell.

if i correctly understood that you mean, there is Ocaml and FP features in many languages. most important things, imho, are anonymous closures and 1st-class functions. even current C# should support this -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com