Yes. Well - almost: you need to concentrate on the subset of programmers who are convertible. Not, ahem, realtime people or PHP coders. The sweet spot would probably be people who already know or are thinking of using Clojure, Kotlin, or Elixir.
Also: I already know the answers to that question, because until recently I was one of those people. And not just a random one, but one of the people most likely to learn a new language - and Haskell was at the bottom of my list. I only played with it after C++, CLOS, Scheme, Groovy, Scala, Python, Ruby, elisp, Perl, Smalltalk, Golang. I’ve even read the tutorials for Prolog, Forth, APL, Rust, Clojure, Lua, and Julia first - and I’d used XMonad. I only tried Haskell this time because I was looking for a fun language and Rust and Julia are boring, a Clojure REPL triggered my Java stacktrace PTSD, Kotlin seemed too much like Scala and not enough of a challenge, Ocaml syntax is ugly, and choosing an APL dialect was confusing enough so that I downloaded GHCI while thinking it over.
…Reasonably, I was in the 5% of programmers you could most easily attract. And if I’d tried a more stable Clojure REPL, you wouldn’t even have got me. THAT is how bad your marketing is.
And I’ve talked to other people since then and their reasons for avoiding Haskell are the same as mine:
- Again - You have no decent quick introductory tour that SELLS the language. A friend of mine was interested enough based on what I told him about Haskell to look for introductions and he found nothing a wall of verbose and tedious dull. EVERY rival did this job better than you do.
- You need tours/tutorials for key libraries too. Not the ones that YOU think are important, like Lenses, but that the ones potential users will care about. Webdev, parsers, OS integration, etc.
- You generate FUD rather than closing it down. Eg lots of bizarre rants about monads, no debunking of memes like
..Which would be easily handled by that language tour.
It’s also worth taking a look at
As a community, you are the kings of bad marketing. Emperors. Gods. I’m an easier sell on the language than 99% of programmers and you only got me by chance. You won’t take the simple, obvious, easy actions that your rivals took years ago.
Anyway - I’m done now. I wouldn’t even have posted this unless you had asked such a smart, sane question.