I love haskell but I wish there was less blogging about why everyone else should use it and more building things that will make people want to use it.
The community is extraordinarily friendly to beginners, as long as you only count how they interact with beginners. If you count having resources that allow beginners to figure something out without having to ask then they are extraordinarily unfriendly.
If I find a potentially interesting library on hackage I'm no longer surprised to find it has no documentation at all, certainly no usage documentation or explanation of what it actually does or what it should be used for. Just code and autogenerated API docs. I'm surprised if there is anything that would allow me to actually use it. I'm not often surprised this way.
That and the wild west, "not invented here", multiple incompatible implementations of new ideas used in different important libraries (iteratees at the moment).
Not trying to throw blame around of course, but people probably don't need your "I have a new metaphor for monads" blog post or an argument for why it's worth learning. People need more posts like the 24 Days of Hackage(http://ocharles.org.uk/blog/) series and the Real World Haskell book and they need some brave person to try and convince those amazing library developers to standardize on an imperfect solution a little sooner and for a little longer (only in public of course).
I think generally the advice to beginners is to ignore most of Hackage and focus on the Haskell platform—which is frankly kind of terrible advice. It's intended to avoid things like the enumerator/iteratee/conduit/pipes madness and focus on a stable library interface, but almost all of the fun is being developed on the bleeding edge of Hackage.
I'd agree completely that this is a deficiency with the Haskell community, but I also don't see it stopping until there's a larger critical mass of new users—a chicken and egg problem, certainly.
I don't think it's a chicken and egg problem quite. It's true that the types of people that do these kinds of things arrive when you have critical mass, but that's just statistics.
I think you can recruit people to do this kind of thing, or at least encourage people to do so, but it would require community management and such which doesn't really exist in the haskell community. If I felt cruel I would nominate dons to do it, since it's so easy to want to give more work to the guy who's already doing a ridiculous amount of good work.
Why does this crap always get posted, and always manage to float instead of being downvoted? You know what other programming language community blogs about their language and tools? ALL OF THEM. Why do people suddenly insist it is a problem that haskell users do the same things everyone else does?
If every time something about ruby showed up on HN someone piped up to say "stop talking about ruby and actually build things people want" they would be rightly downvoted to shit.
The rest of your post is the same sort of nonsense. Some open source code has no documentation?! What a shocker, I'm sure no other programming language has ever had any undocumented modules released in it before. The bitching about iteratees is particularly disingenuous. You don't need to use any of the competing solutions, other languages have no similar library at all, and the entire thing is very new. "Hurry up and standardize your cutting edge libraries that you just wrote and are still exploring" is both insulting and stupid.
> You know what other programming language community blogs about their language and tools? ALL OF THEM
I don't see how that's a response to my complaint about there not being many haskell blog posts about languages and tools that aren't monad tutorials or "why don't more people use haskell". My entire point was wanting blogs about language and tools for fucks sake.
> Some open source code has no documentation?! What a shocker,
Since I said that the levels of documentation on hackage are much lower than the equivalent for every other language I use I'm again not sure what you are responding to. So yeah, a lot of open source code has no documentation. No shit. And the communities/languages that have more documentation have more users. Hackage is awful in this respect relative to other language communities.
The rest is just pointing out that a better haskell platform level of release management would let more people use Haskell productively, it wasn't aimed anywhere near the writers of any of the iteratees libraries.
Skimming over a comment and responding to what you wanted me to say could be considered "insulting and stupid".
>My entire point was wanting blogs about language and tools for fucks sake.
So go read them instead of making nonsense posts?
>Since I said that the levels of documentation on hackage are much lower than the equivalent for every other language
Bullshit. Go look at the docs for random 3rd party modules in any language. Tons of modules are totally undocumented.
Again, nothing you said is in any way reasonable. Everything you said applies equally to any other language, and would be rightfully downvoted in that context. It is sad that HN lets your turds float.
The community is extraordinarily friendly to beginners, as long as you only count how they interact with beginners. If you count having resources that allow beginners to figure something out without having to ask then they are extraordinarily unfriendly.
If I find a potentially interesting library on hackage I'm no longer surprised to find it has no documentation at all, certainly no usage documentation or explanation of what it actually does or what it should be used for. Just code and autogenerated API docs. I'm surprised if there is anything that would allow me to actually use it. I'm not often surprised this way.
That and the wild west, "not invented here", multiple incompatible implementations of new ideas used in different important libraries (iteratees at the moment).
Not trying to throw blame around of course, but people probably don't need your "I have a new metaphor for monads" blog post or an argument for why it's worth learning. People need more posts like the 24 Days of Hackage(http://ocharles.org.uk/blog/) series and the Real World Haskell book and they need some brave person to try and convince those amazing library developers to standardize on an imperfect solution a little sooner and for a little longer (only in public of course).