picking haskell back up

Back in 2012 I wrote a post describing why I was taking some time off of Haskell. Here in 2014, after surveying the landscape and poking around in other tech, I am picking Haskell back up for a personal project.

First, taking a year or so off of Haskell hacking was a great idea. Any time you are in a rut, a change of perspective is useful. During that year I dove deep into Go, and my impression of Go is mostly positive. Go is not a perfect language, but most of the compromises it makes are for the sake of simplicity. Go will not expand your mind, but for 90% of the population stuck on inferior tools, the onramp to Go is short and the benefits are numerous. Go also has traction - you can probably get a job programming Go.

Haskell kept pulling me back though. There is something about developing with Haskell that is challenging and enjoyable. First and foremost, stepping away gave me some perspective and made me more forgiving of some of the parts of Haskell that bothered me. Other tools I looked at disappointed me in other ways; its clear that short of writing my own programming language, I will have to deal with someone else's vision.

Specific notes on the issues I raised in my previous post:

Some of the proactive changes I have made in my own use of Haskell focus on simplicity. I no longer go out of my way to use libraries or techniques just to keep up with the hype cycle. The truth is that most of the programs I write are relatively simplistic in the grand scheme of things, so I get by with the most obvious and idiomatic solution available.


Yes I deleted my comments from the reddit article discussing that post. Sorry, I sometimes shoot off the cuff on reddit and feel no guilt about purging my record from time to time.

last update 2014-03-08