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The problem is, people tell me that if I just learn Haskell, Idris, Closure, Coffescript, Rust, C++17, C#, F#, Swift, D, Lua, Scala, Ruby, Python, Lisp, Scheme, Julia, Emacs Lisp, Vimscript, Smalltalk, Tcl, Verilog, Perl, Go... then I'll finally find 'programming nirvana'.

While you might think it's worth spending 100+ hours learning Haskell, I don't (at the moment) have any reason to Haskell as a better time investment than anything else on that list.. why should I give it more than 10 hours?




I don't know about you, but everything I work on is going to be something that someone will have to maintain, or will be actively developed by multiple people with different categories of expertise. Also, I usually want to build on other people's work (i.e. libraries).

So while I'd love to write big chunks of Haskell, if its just me doing it, that code will be nuked and rewritten unless I also undertake a project of education. So accessibility is key. Go/python/js seem to win in that regard, and likewise in access to libraries.

So unless as an organisation there is motivation to step up skilling, e.g. because there is a lot of money at stake if something breaks (e.g. trading software), or because there is a community of practice (compilers) its hard to see Haskell gaining much ground.

Likewise all those other languages has their niche, and it is hard to seem them displacing each other.


100 hours is really optimistic for haskell


Just a typo, but you mean Clojure? :)


I completely agree.




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