[Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Martin Coxall]

> And this is where I think Haskell has it all over C++, Java, and the
> rest. Haskell is easy to learn at a simple level, and hard to learn at
> the expert level, but once learned is very powerful and has excellent
> payoffs in terms of productivity. With C++ or Java, the expertise is
> somewhat easier to acquire, but you never get the payoff.

That may be true of Java, but it's not of C++. C++'s language
specification is so big, it's almost too big to fit in one person's
brain. It takes many years of studied confusion and a particularly
anal frame of mind to work out what it, and what isn't, legal. And to
top it off, it has a small pattern-matching pure-functional language
with type classes built in that only runs at compile time. And that's
before you get started on learning the various modern idioms you need
to learn to stop C++ from burning you on the arse.

> And before
> you all flame, yes, I do know C++ at an expert level, and that is
> exactly why, after 7 years of writing server software in C++, I now
> want to do it in Haskell.

Me too, which is why I find your statement that expertise in C++ is
easy to acquire. Seeing some of my colleagues' code is enough to tell
me that this is most definitely not the case.

Martin