Jerzy Karczmarczuk wrote:

1. I didn't find ANYTHING about FP on your pages, only that accusations.

I already explained that was not an accusation. How does it follow that since there's nothing else about FP on my website that I "never had anything to do with functional languages"? Do you really think that the 10 pages or so on my website describe the composite of everything I ever did?

2. I don't remember any of your eventual contribution to discussion lists, newsgroups, etc. I might be wrong. Please give some references, publications, functional software, etc. I will apologize then immediately, with regret, but also with satisfaction that the Truth won.

I have never before posted anything on FP to any list or newsgroups. In fact I subscribed to this list only when I saw your message in the list archives. But that's irrelevant. Do you think that everybody that has ever used a functional laguage has contributed to discussion lists and newsgroups?

3. Personally you don't care about Haskell. Your page *explicitly* discourages local people from touching functional languages, the category of people you want to hire is a very strong signal. A potential employer who does what you did serves the devil, don't try to suggest that this isn't relevant.

Nonsense. I'm hiring C++ and Java programmers because I need help with the C++ and Java projects I do. I don't see how that would discourage anybody from learning about other languages? And why would you assume that I personally don't care about Haskell? You seem to be piling these assumptions about me at random.

1. Saying that the Haskell community offers Hugs98, and not mentioning neither GHC, nor NHC is either incompetent or provocative.

Hugs is the distribution that's suggested to newcommers. It didn't seem relevant to talk about other distributions if we are talking about people migrating to Haskell.

2. A decent programming language *must* be stable. If the main criterion of the "quality" you attribute to programming languages is the speed of its modifications, I wonder what don't you accuse of staleness your favourite languages: Java and C++.

Again, wrong assumptions. Neither C++ nor Java are not my favourite language. I don't have a favourite language. The fact that Java has not grown for a number of years is a horror. The language lacks support for types with value semantics, generic types and other useful facilities. Those have all been proposed but Sun has not moved to implement them. C++ is more expressive. The only addition I can think of right now that would be worth the added complexity would be Java-like inner classes and anonymous classes and functions. I was actually contemplating writing about the above things. But it just so happened that I wrote about Haskell first. I don't understand why the order in which I write things is bothering you? Or did you expect to come and find a complete 200-page analysis of all popular programming languages? But again, this is irrelevant. I was not talking about the language. In fact I said that Haskell is superior to Python, Perl and Ruby at the very beginning of my article. But the Haskell website and the _distributions_ seem to be moving at a slower pace.

Hugs 2001???? Are you sure that you really know what does it mean a STANDARD?

Yes. Haskell 98 is a standard. Hugs is a product. It doesn't have to be called Hugs 98. It can be called Hugs 2001, Hugs XP, Hugs ME, Visual Hugs :) or any other attractive name. Anybody programming in Haskell will benefit from other users migrating to it. More users means more vendors and more libraries. Perception is one of the factors that influences the number of users. Commercial world knows this. Microsoft incremented the version of Word from 2.0 to 6.0 in order to avoid having Word perceived as less mature than WordPerfect. The incremented the Visual C++ version from 2.0 to 4.0 in order to match Borland C++. Sun called Java 1.2 "Java 2". Etc. The examples above are extreme and, IMO, slightly dishonest. I just brought them up to illustrate the point vividly. Calling the Hugs February 2001 distribution "Hugs 2001" is not dishonest, it's just good marketing.

1. Oh yes. Thousands of books about Ruby. Actually one, in Japanese. Have you looked here: http://www.haskell.org/bookshelf/ This is comparable with Python. Of course, Python IS more popular, but - -

I included Ruby in the trio because it fits the scripting language phenomenon. Python is the one to compare against due to similar starting positions. Go to a bookstore. The fact that many books on Haskell have been published doesn't mean that many people are buying them. The bookstores I visit in the States have a number of books on Perl and Python. If they carry books on Haskell at all that's usually one title hidden somewhere on the shelf. Also, it is a known fact that books on specific products ("Teach Yourself Visual C++ in 21 Days") greatly outsell books on programming languages ("The C++ Programming Language"). Guess of which kind are Haskell books?

2. You neglect, and I suspect that you do it on purpose, that the main driving force behind the evolution of Haskell is *RESEARCH*. An issue absent from many "popular" languages which are meant to be immediately exploitable with very flat learning curve.

Flat learning curve is ideal. Since that's not possible, the smallest possible barrier to entry is the next best thing. Why does that bother you?

The documentation on line is sufficiently good that e.g. - my students won't even think about going and trying to buy a book.

No doubt. Ditto for Python and Java. But that's besides the point. If Haskell was more popular the publishing industry would be on the bandwagon. No? Remember, I brought up the number of books sold as a way to gauge the popularity of Haskell in relation to Python.

Still, there are more publications on FP every month that I can digest. What about Python? Java?

Do you have _any_ idea what the average programmer is reading these days? _Nothing_. Not one trade publication, not one book. (See "Rapid Development" for statistics on this.) DDJ is probably one of the most popular trade magazines. Its circulation is 155,000. What percentage of the working programmers is that? How big is the membership in IEEE or ACM? How many practicing programmers read IEEE Software, let alone any of the Journals? All those publications on FP are _not_ reaching the average programmer.

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BTW, you seem to be well-informed about who this Jelovic is. Why don't you share that knowledge with us? :)

Oh, but I did. You seem to be a self-appointed specialist on functional languages, who expresses in public some very dubious truths, which I find harmful.

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1. I didn't accuse anybody of anything. I was just curious about why

I never said I was a specialist. Do only specialists get a voice? people

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aren't using Haskell and started to think about it.

I understood this in such a way.

You seem to be the only one. On this list and off. Doesn't this tell you anything?

You are explicitly negative in your *judgement*.

I said that the language is good, but that the distributions are not good enough to facilliate widespead use. A number of people on this list agreed. Why is this giving you an ulcer?

There are hundreds of libraries of Java classes and C++ classes and procedures which are distributed separately. The "standard" GNU distribution of C++ is quite limited, there is no point in overloading the standard environment by things whose usage is limited. The ease of installation is also important.

The standard Java library is actually quite comprehensive. I'd go so far to say that it's one of the main reasons why Java has spread so quickly. The standard C++ library is too small. That's a problem with C++. But the language spread before GUIs and before the Web when people required less. If Haskell is to have a chance its distribution(s) must have a comprehensive library.

BTW. the GHC "standard" distribution has an adequate amount of runtime support for normal tasks. It worked for me without any problem.

You underestimate the value of a large community and lots of vendors. In my last project I had to manipulate some graphic files in various formats. For C++ and Java I had turnkey solutions. (Java being better as it has a standard Image class while for C++ no standard exists.) The closest thing I found for Haskell is a GD wrapper with limited functionality.

RRight. I found one point worth mentioning. Wonderful, splendid, and original. Hereby I declare that you are the winner of this discussion, and I am the loser.

Relax. I was just nitpicking in order to get a rise out of you. So far you have used "silly", "incompetent", "accuse", "Truth", "serve the devil", "moral", "nasty", "dubious" and "harmful". Funny how people are eager to use such qualifications over the Internet but avoid saying them when they have to look the other person in the eyes, don't you think? You also didn't have the common courtesy and courage to CC: me on your initial posting to this list. Dejan http://www.jelovic.com