> I agree. You master monads and IO, but then you want to use a web framework and there a bunch of other category theoretical concepts and/or Haskell advanced features you need to understand to serve up "Hello World". Compare that to expressjs.
I started using haskell at my last job after having done a couple years of functional programming in scala, but I honestly never found it required that much knowledge of category theory. The FAM trio of classes (functor, applicative, monad) are the most common ideas used from category theory in an explicit way, and they're frankly so prevalent at this point in the industry at large that they're in basically every language in extremely common libraries. Most programmers are pretty familiar w/ map and bind (which is also sometimes called flatMap, then, and_then, or chain). Applicative functors might be a little more exotic, but they're easy to pick up if you understand the other two. And I don't think you really need to understand what a morphism is or how to read arrow diagrams to really use any of these things. If you can use arrays in javascript, you can use the IO monad.
Most of the challenge in haskell for me was figuring out stuff like how I should structure my code to enable mocking out effects for testing (there's multiple answers to this w/ different tradeoffs), or how to get good editor support without ghc-mod breaking. I haven't used haskell in industry in about the past two years, but I imagine these are still some of the biggest challenges w/ using it.
Do you think it would be dramatically improved if Haskell had a bigger community of people contributing user-friendly libraries and tutorials? That was something that made Ruby the perfect newbie language for me. And something I feel is downplayed in Haskell given it's more advanced user base who is a little too obsessed with it's power and demonstrating their knowledge as such, rather than help make it accessible to others.
I can't count the amount of times I came across a popular Haskell library with very little documentation rather than it's type/function API and general blurb about what it does. This is very different that most popular JS/Ruby/Python/etc libraries which include quick-start/getting started/usage examples/etc etc.
> Do you think it would be dramatically improved if Haskell had a bigger community of people contributing user-friendly libraries and tutorials? That was something that made Ruby the perfect newbie language for me. And something I feel is downplayed in Haskell given it's more advanced user base who is a little too obsessed with it's power and demonstrating their knowledge as such, rather than help make it accessible to others.
Absolutely. I think it's been getting better at that on the tutorial front. For a long time there were very few books I'd actually recommend for haskell, but Haskell Programming from First Principles [1] changed that for me (personally). And I think Stephen Diehl's excellent What I Wish I Knew When Learning Haskell [2] is a fantastic general resource for newbies. But I think the community could stand to have more of this, absolutely.
And I definitely agree about libraries. I'd like to see more haskell libraries with extended tutorials, and written w/ a non-expert audience in mind. I think the community has for so long been dominated by long-time haskell developers and people ensconced in functional programming, much of the documentation is written for those kinds of people.
Ergonomics is probably the number one thing that matters on the long run for computer languages.
Make the frequent things easy and safe. And this means syntax should be easy to read and write, documentation should be plentiful and easy to read, easy to start using, even if you are not expert in the area that that particular library covers, etc.
Rust also suffers a bit from this, as more and more libraries are just the generated docs. Here are these 30 structs and 100 impls, godspeed. Yeah, but what is this library, when I would use it? What's the most 100 common use cases?
And a 100 might seem like a lot, but people will chose that instantly works for them. And there are a lot of strange stacks out there. Sometimes people just want the low-level bits of your library. No docs/API for that? Damn. Sometimes people just want to use it as a one-liner, no config files, no import-server-deploy, no binary? Damn.
The more flexible a language is, the more documentation its libraries need.
One often-ignored benefit of constrained languages like Java where there's really only one way to do most things, is that when you get a library you immediately have a reasonable idea of how to use it (given the entity names and types). If a language has a more advanced type system (or none at all), you can't lean on that existing framework and the author needs to do more legwork to explicitly lay out exactly what it is they've made. This doesn't make more advanced languages bad, but library documentation is often neglected and that probably contributes a lot to the inaccessibility of those ecosystems.
I started using haskell at my last job after having done a couple years of functional programming in scala, but I honestly never found it required that much knowledge of category theory. The FAM trio of classes (functor, applicative, monad) are the most common ideas used from category theory in an explicit way, and they're frankly so prevalent at this point in the industry at large that they're in basically every language in extremely common libraries. Most programmers are pretty familiar w/ map and bind (which is also sometimes called flatMap, then, and_then, or chain). Applicative functors might be a little more exotic, but they're easy to pick up if you understand the other two. And I don't think you really need to understand what a morphism is or how to read arrow diagrams to really use any of these things. If you can use arrays in javascript, you can use the IO monad.
Most of the challenge in haskell for me was figuring out stuff like how I should structure my code to enable mocking out effects for testing (there's multiple answers to this w/ different tradeoffs), or how to get good editor support without ghc-mod breaking. I haven't used haskell in industry in about the past two years, but I imagine these are still some of the biggest challenges w/ using it.