The "Begin Rust" book

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There was an image that made the rounds a while ago.

Haskell as seen by other language fans

The joke being: haha, Haskell is only for super-geniuses like Einstein. There's lots to complain about in this chart, but I'm going to pick on the lower-right corner. Specifically:

Haskellers don't use Haskell because we think we're Einstein. We use Haskell because we know we aren't.

When I speak to Haskellers, the general consensus is: "I'm not smart enough to write robust code in a language like Python." We're not using Haskell because we're brilliant; we're using Haskell because we know we need a language that will protect us from ourselves.

That said, I should acknowledge that Haskell does have a steeper learning curve for most programmers. But this is mostly to do with unfamiliarity: Haskell is significantly different from languages like Python, Ruby, and Java, whereas by contrast those languages are all relatively similar to each other. Great educational material helps with this.

You should set your expectations appropriately: it will take you longer to learn Haskell, but it's worth it. Personally, I use Haskell because:

  • It gives me the highest degree of confidence that I'll write my program correctly, due to its strong, static typing
  • It has great support for modern programming techniques, like functional programming and green-thread-based concurrency
  • I can write more maintainable code in it than other languages
  • It has a great set of libraries and tools
  • It's got great performance characteristics for high-level code, and allows low-level performance tweaking when needed

I'm certainly leaving off a lot of points here, my goal isn't to be comprehensive. Instead, I'd like to dispel with this notion of the Haskeller super-genius. We Haskellers don't believe it. We know why we're using a language like Haskell: to protect us from ourselves.

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