I often hear how happy Haskellers are because they have such a great and unique language. They must be proud of how the outer world respects this Hask

graninas / The-Voids-Of-Haskell

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2021-05-30 08:00:04

I often hear how happy Haskellers are because they have such a great and unique language. They must be proud of how the outer world respects this Haskell technical superiority, and how the language influences all the other languages. This is deserved for sure, and it’s definitely a reason for pride.

But when it comes to the closer comparison with any other mainstream language, we see that not everything in the Haskell ecosystem is good enough. The skies are getting dark revealing some problems, some imperfectness of the bright picture we’re trying to present to the outer world. It’s not a total eclipse; the community has made a great effort to improve the ecosystem: theoretical foundations of the language, the GHC compiler, packaging/building tools (stack & cabal), IDEs (HLS), libraries, the Haskell process itself (Haskell Foundation), - all these things are reasonably good and getting better.

However, there is a sunspot, a definite flaw in the ecosystem that causes the suboptimal expansion of the language. The flaw that makes the outer world considering Haskell to be impractical and incapable of being a low-risk language. The flaw that scares away many people who could be our colleagues but who considered Haskell not worth learning.

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