The Strengths Of Haskell (42 strengths listed so far)

#21

@ntwilson

My intention with that statement was to refute @hasufell’s statement that Haskell has “worse tooling than most languages”.

#22

Yeah, I think @hasufell’s statement is technically false, but I think the point they were getting at is valid, which is that it doesn’t make sense to list tooling as a strength of Haskell, since it’s behind the “status quo” or the “typical developer experience.”

Of course, with that viewpoint it matters what the intent of the list of strengths is! I suppose I walked in with the assumption that it was sort of Haskell’s strengths relative to that typical developer experience (the sort of list you would use to convince typical developers to use Haskell), and the list could be intending something very different. So perhaps it’s useful to clarify what the list is for?

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#23

@ntwilson

Clarifying the nature of the list is a good point (I’m thinking about that). I want to be able to list, for example, that there are more than 30 books written about Haskell, which I think is great. I’m sure there are hundreds of books on Java and Python but I don’t think that diminishes the books that Haskell has. So when I said that Haskell has more than 30 books I certainly didn’t (and don’t) mean that “Haskell has more books available than the most popular languages… so therefore use Haskell”, so in general I am making the list from more of an absolute perspective on strengths rather than looking at Haskell relative to how it outdoes the most used languages on these points. I’ll progressively add details to each point to add clarity on this.

I haven’t included a strength about tooling in general, however, as I said in my response to @hasufell, which you quoted, the existence of Haskell’s compiler could mean that Haskell’s tooling is better than that of Python, JavaScript, and Ruby…if you count the compiler as a tool. …and those languages cover a lot of developers.

I actually haven’t seen any listing for the number of developers for each language, and I would be very interested in seeing that. But if most developers are using dynamic languages, for example, then I think there is still a case to be made for “Haskell’s tooling” being superior, even compared to what most developers have experienced.

With what I wrote, I just meant to say that Haskell’s language server support is getting better:
“#strength013 - Increasingly Awesome Language Server Support”

I’m thinking that a few years ago there wasn’t much happening with language server support and now it can do some pretty cool things so that is a positive, and I would like to list it as such.

I refined the point with a clarification, and I changed “awesome” to “good”. So now its:

#strength013 - Increasingly Awesome Good Language Server Support (a few years ago there wasn’t much language server support and now it can do some pretty cool things)

Thanks for your thoughts on this!

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#24

#strengh172 — Functors in Haskell are strong. :nerd_face: … I’ll show myself out.

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