Re:Haskell in Production: The good, the bad, and the ugly
by davidw on Wednesday October 31, 2012 @04:54PM
(#4724884)
Hrm. I was reading a book about copy writing recently, and one of the takeaways was that you really want to be selling a cure, rather than a prevention.
Meaning, people will pay a lot and care a lot about curing some particular disease, but preventing it... they might pay something for it, but it's probably not really on their radar.
Haskell, with all the fancy CS stuff, is selling prevention, in some sense. "We promise that your code will somehow be better"... well ok, but that doesn't really sell me. I'm being told to eat my vegetables rather than being shown a tasty steak. Compare and contrast with Rails when it came out, which showed you how you could write code that was 1) more organized than PHP, but 2) not as bureaucratic as Java. Cool stuff!
Reality is not black and white, but perhaps there's a grain of truth in there? Perhaps Haskell people could do a better job of showing how the CS stuff helps with real problems? I can't really say as it's simply not on my radar all that much, so they could well be screaming about it from the rooftops and I wouldn't have heard too much.
Meaning, people will pay a lot and care a lot about curing some particular disease, but preventing it... they might pay something for it, but it's probably not really on their radar.
Haskell, with all the fancy CS stuff, is selling prevention, in some sense. "We promise that your code will somehow be better"... well ok, but that doesn't really sell me. I'm being told to eat my vegetables rather than being shown a tasty steak. Compare and contrast with Rails when it came out, which showed you how you could write code that was 1) more organized than PHP, but 2) not as bureaucratic as Java. Cool stuff!
Reality is not black and white, but perhaps there's a grain of truth in there? Perhaps Haskell people could do a better job of showing how the CS stuff helps with real problems? I can't really say as it's simply not on my radar all that much, so they could well be screaming about it from the rooftops and I wouldn't have heard too much.