Why Haskell Is Worth Learning

You're simply not in my audience at all--you have too much of a predisposition against Haskell. It's not worth trying to convince you, or anybody similarly biased, because there are so many other people willing to hear me out.

So yes, maybe I won't get any further than your professor. No big loss.

Anyhow, why do you think Haskell--the language with libraries dedicated to managing state--pretends that state doesn't exist? If anything, Haskell is the only language that takes any sort of mathematical approach for modelling (and thus managing) state at all!

There's a reason why some of the most progressive and mathematically sound ways of dealing with state--my favorite example is functional reactive programming--take root in Haskell. If all you want are mutable references and data structures, we have that too. Cleverly integrated with the type system, to boot. We even have some of the best concurrency features (which are naturally based on mutable state!) like STM. STM that's not only actually usable but actually easy.

As for software written in Haskell? There's already plenty. Pandoc is simply the best in its class--I don't think it has any real competition, even. XMonad is a great window manager. Darcs is a dvcs that existed before Git took off, and has a clever model. I use Hakyll for my website, as do some prolific HNers like gwern, and it's great. Gitit is a nice, lightweight wiki. Git-annex helps you manage files on top of Git. The backend for DeTeXify, which everyone using (La)TeX should be familiar with, is written in Haskell.

And these are just the things I could think of from the top of my head, mainly things I personally use.

All these are practical utilities that you might use. If you're willing to look further afield, there are all sorts of more specific tools like Agda and a host of DSLs for everything from SMT solvers to realtime embedded programming.

Then there are the rich and relatively impressive web frameworks like Snap, Yesod and Happstack. Yesod in particular is very fully featured and useable; it has some very cool sites built on top of it including the recently released School of Haskell.

What about stuff I'm personally working on? If you're playing around with the GreenArrays chip, I currently have a simple simulator for the F18A instruction set as well as simple system for synthesizing F18A code using a randomized hill-climbing algorithm. Unfortunately, both are currently limited to one core, but that should be easy to fix. I was also working on a DSL for generating F18A code, but that fell by the wayside recently.

So clearly people are writing tons of useful software in Haskell. And people are using it. But that obviously won't satisfy you. Which, as I said above, is fine.

But if you're actually somebody else--preferably either a startup founder or somebody with control over what technology to use--you should definitely give Haskell a whirl!

At my university, everyone started with a Scheme course followed by a Java course. The Scheme course starts out functionally, but never mentions it. People didn't have too many problems there except with recursion, and most of them got that after a couple of lessons.

The Java course? Not so easy! People did have problems with if statements (why is it a statement and not an expression?). They also had problems with figuring out what was a reference in Java and what was passed by value. A lot of problems with that particular facet, in fact. In fact, the people without any programming experience before college had more problems with Java than with Scheme, despite the fact that the Java course was second.

Basically, you're projecting your years of experience with imperative programming onto what you imagine a beginner thinks like. I do not think this is particularly accurate--it certainly doesn't match what I've seen in practice.

For people with literally no programming experience, functional programming is not less natural at all. If anything, it makes more sense, because it fits with the minimal mathematical background everyone has.

I don't see how that's a response to my complaint about there not being many haskell blog posts about languages and tools that aren't monad tutorials or "why don't more people use haskell". My entire point was wanting blogs about language and tools for fucks sake.

> Some open source code has no documentation?! What a shocker,

Since I said that the levels of documentation on hackage are much lower than the equivalent for every other language I use I'm again not sure what you are responding to. So yeah, a lot of open source code has no documentation. No shit. And the communities/languages that have more documentation have more users. Hackage is awful in this respect relative to other language communities.

The rest is just pointing out that a better haskell platform level of release management would let more people use Haskell productively, it wasn't aimed anywhere near the writers of any of the iteratees libraries.

Skimming over a comment and responding to what you wanted me to say could be considered "insulting and stupid".

So go read them instead of making nonsense posts?

>Since I said that the levels of documentation on hackage are much lower than the equivalent for every other language

Bullshit. Go look at the docs for random 3rd party modules in any language. Tons of modules are totally undocumented.

Again, nothing you said is in any way reasonable. Everything you said applies equally to any other language, and would be rightfully downvoted in that context. It is sad that HN lets your turds float.