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   blake shaw 🇵🇸 (rml@functional.cafe)'s status on Sunday, 14-May-2023 16:38:45 JST blake shaw 🇵🇸

   Cue quarterly #Haskell community meltdown

   To be fair, I think Haskell will continue to fill the niche it filled ~10 years ago, around the time it started to get mainstream hype. Small teams of skilled devs delivering robust products that would normally require much larger teams to maintain will continue to prevail. Purely functional lazy programming was never bound for world domination in an economy which is antagnostic to curiosity, creativity and truths.

   On the other hand, I have the feeling that we're going to see more and more Haskellers-turned-Rustaceans come to realize that #Rust does little to alleviate the primary barrier to Haskell's wider success -- fast and predictable turnaround time for projects developing cutting-edge technologies -- and will wind up going the same route as some major Haskell projects such as #Unison and #Idris have in recent years, which is to try #Chez Scheme, only to discover that it allows them to release blazing fast functional programs on a generic foundation where major breaking changes are practically non-existent, providing incredible flexibility while significantly reducing dependencies by dint of the ad-hoc tooling that falls out of the bottom of #scheme. Not to mention the joys that come from near-instant startup times, some of the fastest compile time you've ever encountered, fully-customizable interactive development and a surgical #debugger that rivals Haskell in scheer fun. Yesterdays naysayers will become tomorrow's enthusiastic bootstrappers. Or a at least a boy can dream.

   That said, in all seriousness I don't think Scheme will ever reach the heights of Haskell's moderate commercial success. But I do think that projects built on Scheme, like Unison, will get a leg up and eventually surpass it, and interest in #lisp will only grow.

   https://nitter.net/graninas/status/1656519682822746113?cursor=NwAAAPAoHBlWgoCxgZ7Grf0tgsCz2c64l_0tjIC2pczQo_0thIC9xfeLvv0tgoCx4eq3tv0tJQISFQQAAA#r

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     blake shaw 🇵🇸 (rml@functional.cafe)'s status on Sunday, 14-May-2023 19:04:09 JST blake shaw 🇵🇸

     in reply to

     • Alex McLean

     @yaxu in a way I understand them, because language popularity ultimately determines how we will have to spend our time amidst our 9 to 5 grind, and also that unlike most other fields, many hackers are involved in the development of the tools they use, so there is some vested interests as well.

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     Alex McLean (yaxu@post.lurk.org)'s status on Sunday, 14-May-2023 19:04:10 JST Alex McLean

     in reply to

     @rml interesting to see that there's a weird corner of software engineering where people believe programming languages are perpetually at war with one another

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     Alex McLean (yaxu@post.lurk.org)'s status on Sunday, 14-May-2023 19:04:12 JST Alex McLean

     in reply to

     @rml I'm not really in that world, lucky to be able to move between languages and enjoy their different perspectives. But, I don't think it's healthy thinking really, pigeon-holing yourself and then fighting an imaginary war against other kinds of pigeons.

     I guess as a researcher, I just see huge value in the idea of a 'research language'. Programming language development has been really stuck for decades so I'm all for learning research languages and trying out a new way of thinking.

     It would be nice if we found ways in which the economy could support curiosity and creativity..

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     Alex McLean (yaxu@post.lurk.org)'s status on Sunday, 14-May-2023 19:05:40 JST Alex McLean

     in reply to

     • Dave Griffiths

     @rml I remember doing a performance with @nebogeo, I was using Haskell, he was using Scheme. A CS person in the audience came up afterwards and said he enjoyed it, but could barely understand how we were in the same room, let alone sharing a stage. I think he was only half joking. That's one aspect of it.

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     blake shaw 🇵🇸 (rml@functional.cafe)'s status on Sunday, 14-May-2023 19:05:42 JST blake shaw 🇵🇸

     in reply to

     • Alex McLean

     @yaxu really? what is it about language wars that are holding back the design and implementation of programming languages?

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     Alex McLean (yaxu@post.lurk.org)'s status on Sunday, 14-May-2023 19:05:42 JST Alex McLean

     in reply to

     @rml More broadly programming language culture is limiting because it is exclusionary, and poorly equipped to challenge its basic assumptions about what a programming language is and what its for.
     I think war-like rhetoric is more of a symptom of that, than a cause.

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     Alex McLean (yaxu@post.lurk.org)'s status on Sunday, 14-May-2023 19:05:43 JST Alex McLean

     in reply to

     @rml Basically I think what's really holding back programming languages is programming language culture, and this war-like rhetoric is part of that.