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Peaker | 7 years ago

I've mentored programmers in Haskell and they were also productive within a few weeks.

I'm pretty sure I could get a student to write useful Haskell code in that time span with just mentoring and existing documentation material.

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yogthos|7 years ago

Unfortunately, that doesn't match my experience at all. Haskell requires understanding many more concepts to use effectively than Clojure. Lazy evaluation, large syntax, and the advanced type system all add complexity. My experience is that it takes people a long time before they're able to read and write idiomatic Haskell code without assistance.

With Clojure, we're able to do a very quick ramp up, and then have new hires write code with very little assistance from the rest of the team. I simply haven't seen this be the case with Haskell even for experienced developers.

Peaker|7 years ago

I suspect the problem is mentoring. It took me months to get basic Haskell.

The people I mentored, though, could clarify any misunderstanding and get explanations from multiple viewpoints from me -- after years of experience with these abstractions. With such mentoring, you don't have to go through all the confusion phases.

moomin|7 years ago

I think the thing is, if you want to write at a Clojure-level-abstraction, Haskell won’t stop you doing that and I get the impression that it’s actually the way a lot of Haskell programmers operate. (Chas Emerick has recently been advocating this approach and I get the impression it’s actually the style of GHC itself.)

We don’t all have to be at EK, BM or GGs level.

yen223|7 years ago

> I think the thing is, if you want to write at a Clojure-level-abstraction, Haskell won’t stop you doing that

Unless Haskell drastically fixed its record syntax recently, this is definitely not the case.