[denismenace]

They also assumed Haskell performed so well, because the author was an expert at it. So, they independently hired a college graduate with no prior knowledge of Haskell and gave him 8 days to learn it. Turns out the graduate implemented the second best solution in terms of lines of code and development time.

[kubb]

But they hired someone capable of learning.

99% of developers will not learn a language that doesn’t look familiar to them on principle. They don’t like it and it’s the end of discussion.

[blacksqr]

What a shame.

When I started out in the 1990s professional programmers generally made a point of learning new languages, to acquire skills and expose themselves to alternate ways of thinking.

I remember a boss in the early 2ks who was teaching himself OCaml in his spare time just because.

[bluGill]

There are a lot of developers that won't even learn new things about their current language. I'm still fighting to get some people to adopt C++11 which is 13 years old now.

[hresvelgr]

I think the dichotomy of script kiddies versus hackers applies aptly to modern developers. Some developers learn their frameworks and libraries and enough of the language to be productive (script kiddies), whereas some have a keen interest in understanding how a system works and the art of software engineering (hackers). Hackers in my experience are still a very rare breed.

[epgui]

This has been my experience with most engineers.

[marcosdumay]

One of the other competitors was the project head. All of those people seem deeply inclined into learning and experimenting.

[gaze]

Even if this is sometimes true, when you adopt this viewpoint your work turns to crap. Hire good people, and if you can't hire good people, do something more interesting.

[golly_ned]

How did they learn the languages they currently know?

Perhaps only God knows.

[pyrale]

Monkeys using a typewriter were also proven to be 83% more productive than the average developer. Study suggests that their edge likely came from not understanding and ignoring the certified scrum master™.

[kccqzy]

Someone who learned Haskell intensely for 8 days could very well be more productive than someone who learned Haskell intensely for 80 days. The former probably got a good introduction to the standard library functions and has become familiar with the main classes like Functor, Applicative, Foldable, Traversable. The latter might be too engorged in advanced language features like TypeInType; or evaluating and choosing between slightly different abstractions to accomplish a single goal, like choosing van Laarhoven optics vs profunctor optics.

And I'm not trying to demean advanced type system extensions or van Laarhoven lenses; I'm just reflecting on my personal journey with Haskell. Playing around with the language in this way is similar to playing around with advanced template meta programming in C++. It just takes experience to have the discipline to know the difference and write simple code and be productive.

[mhitza]

Submitted report was published in 1994.

At the time I don't think Haskell had any of that, and not sure when monads were introduced in Haskell either (wasn't on day 1 I think). Which means that the language was simpler in some aspects.

But what I do think made the job simpler is that they had easy access to other people that knew Haskell. Whereas, today, unless you have a mentor you're going to need to handle any issues you're encountering via delayed responses on community forums... Or AI, most of the time.