How to grow the (commercial) Haskell user base?

[ktf]

@jazzlobster

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

Again as a newcomer, I have to say: this is a fantastic summary. If slightly painful to read

You have no decent quick introductory tour that SELLS the language.

Related to this: initially, I wasn’t really sold on Haskell being viable for my needs until I stumbled across State of the Haskell Ecosystem. This is by no means “quick” (nor is it up to date), but reading its sections on, e.g., Maintenance and Single-machine concurrency and Types (among others) left me feeling super-excited and ready to dive in. I was PUMPED for Haskell after that.

And as a major bonus, it also links to common libraries and frameworks in the domains it describes, which really helped me with discovery. In other words, it gives both the WHY and the HOW to use Haskell to achieve actual programming tasks. And again, maybe most importantly: it got me excited!

That kind of thing is sorely missing from any official pages/docs, IMO.