Two new blog posts

posts.yaml

@@ -1,3 +1,9 @@
+- file: posts/spreading-the-gospel-of-haskell.md
+  title: "Spreading the Gospel of Haskell"
+  day: 2016-11-27
+- file: posts/haskell-is-for-dumb-people.md
+  title: "Haskell is for Dumb People"
+  day: 2016-11-23
 - file: posts/haskells-missing-concurrency-basics.md
   title: "Haskell's Missing Concurrency Basics"
   day: 2016-11-16

posts/haskell-is-for-dumb-people.md

@@ -0,0 +1,33 @@
+There was an image that made the rounds a while ago.
+
+<img src="/static/haskell-as-seen-by.png" alt="Haskell as seen by other language fans" style="max-width:100%">
+
+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.
+
+I use Haskell because (in this order):
+
+* 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](https://haskell-lang.org/libraries) and
+  [tools](https://haskell-lang.org/get-started)
+* 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.

posts/spreading-the-gospel-of-haskell.md

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+Last week I fired off two tweets about the state of Haskell evangelism:
+
+<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I&#39;d hoped by now we&#39;d be out spreading the gospel of Haskell&#39;s awesome features. Instead, we&#39;re fighting about the same broken things.</p>&mdash; Michael Snoyman (@snoyberg) <a href="https://twitter.com/snoyberg/status/800585540177432576">November 21, 2016</a></blockquote>
+<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Haskell is by far the best language on the market today. It&#39;s so sad to see it not gaining traction because of unimportant details.</p>&mdash; Michael Snoyman (@snoyberg) <a href="https://twitter.com/snoyberg/status/800586069863301120">November 21, 2016</a></blockquote>
+<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
+
+But simply complaining about the state of things, instead of actually
+proposing a way to make things better, is a waste of 280
+characters. So I'd like to expand on where I think we, the Haskell
+community, can do better.
+
+To try and prevent the flamewars which I'm sure are about to start,
+let me give some guidelines on __who shouldn't read this blog post__:
+
+* If you think that programming languages should succeed on purely
+  technical merits, and silly "marketing activities" like writing
+  newbie-oriented tutorials and making engaging screencasts is unfair
+  competition, you shouldn't read this blog post.
+* If you think that broken dependency solving, Hackage downtime,
+  confusing cabal-install incantations, and problematic global package
+  databases in the Haskell Platform have had no ill effect on Haskell
+  adoption, you shouldn't read this blog post.
+* If you think that new users who give up after 5 minutes of confusion
+  on a website weren't serious enough in the first place and we
+  shouldn't be sad that we lost them, you shouldn't read this blog
+  post.
+
+And most likely, you shouldn't post this to /r/haskell. That's not
+going to end well.
+
+## Attacking Haskell's Flaws
+
+As the Twitter discussion yesterday pointed out, there are undoubtedly
+flaws in Haskell. It may be __inflammatory__ to admit that publicly,
+but so be it. Every language has flaws. Haskell is blessed to also
+have some of the greatest strengths in any programming language
+available today: beautiful concurrency, a powerful _and_ useful type
+system, a plethora of real-world libraries, and (as of recently)
+pretty good tooling and educational resources.
+
+At FP Complete, we often talk about the __attractors__ and
+__obstacles__ (thanks to our CEO, Aaron Contorer, for this great prism
+to view things). Using that terminology: Haskell is chalk-full of
+attractors. The problem is the obstacles which prevent Haskell from
+taking off. I'm going to claim that, at this point, we need to do very
+little as far as making Haskell more attrative, but instead need to
+collectively knock down obstacles preventing its success.
+
+Obstacles can be a great many things, some of which you may have
+categorized as "missing attractors." Let me give some examples:
+
+* Missing IDE tooling. For some people, this is a deal-breaker, and
+  will prevent them from using Haskell.
+* A missing library. Again, if someone needs to access, say, MS SQL
+  Server, and a library doesn't exist, this is an obstacle to
+  adoption. (Yes, that person could go ahead and write the library
+  him/herself. If you think that's the right response, you probably
+  shouldn't be reading this blog post.)
+* Lack of a tutorial/example/cookbook for a specific problem
+  domain. Yes, someone could struggle through reading API docs until
+  "it clicks." If that's your answer: also probably shouldn't be
+  reading this post.
+* Lack of support for an OS/architecture.
+
+The important thing about obstacles is that they are not
+universal. For most of us, lack of support for Haiku OS will not
+prevent us from using Haskell. Those of us who have been using Haskell
+for years have decided that the obstacles of bad tooling weren't
+enough to deter us from the great language features. And so on.
+
+## Prioritizing
+
+Many people in the Haskell community have been chipping away at random
+obstacles (or adding random attractors) for years now, on a hobbyist
+basis. If that's all you want to do, more power to you, and
+enjoy. What I'm doing here is making a call for a more concerted,
+organized effort into knocking down these obstacles to Haskell
+adoption.
+
+I'd say that we can measure how high a priority an obstacle-destroying
+action is based on two criteria:
+
+* How difficult it will be to accomplish
+* How big an impact it will have on Haskell adoption
+
+I would call easy actions with big impact _low hanging fruit_, and
+recommend we focus on those actions for now. In other words, while
+improving GHC compile times may have a big impact, it's also difficult
+to accomplish. Similarly, changing the Haskell logo from purple to
+blue is easy to accomplish, but doesn't have much impact.
+
+So my set of easy to do and big impact things entirely come down to
+*spreading the word*. I would say our biggest and easiest knocked-down
+obstacles are:
+
+* Someone's never heard of Haskell
+* Someone's heard of Haskell, but doesn't know why it's relevant
+* Someone's well aware of Haskell, but thinks it will be hard to start
+  with
+* Someone's already tried Haskell and run into problems (like
+  Dependency Hell), and doesn't realize we've solved them
+
+So what does this entail? Here are my suggestions:
+
+* Write a blog post about how you solved a problem in Haskell
+* Give a talk at a conference on what problems Haskell is particularly
+  good at solving (my money goes to concurrency on this)
+* Put together a screencast on Haskell
+* Encourage a non-Haskeller to go through the
+  [Haskell Book](http://haskellbook.com/) and
+  [Haskell Syllabus](https://www.fpcomplete.com/haskell-syllabus)
+
+The intention here to show the world that Haskell is ready to help
+them, and that it's easy to get started now. Many of us at FP Complete
+have been putting out
+[such](https://www.fpcomplete.com/blog/2016/11/comparative-concurrency-with-haskell)
+[posts](https://www.fpcomplete.com/blog/2016/10/static-compilation-with-stack)
+[for](https://www.fpcomplete.com/blog/2016/09/practical-haskell-simple-file-mirror-1)
+a
+[while](https://www.fpcomplete.com/blog/2016/08/bitrot-free-scripts). I'm
+asking others to join in the fun and help give Haskell adoption a
+kick-start.
+
+One final request: if you've gotten this far, odds are you agree that
+we need to encourage users to take the most-likely-to-succeed route to
+Haskell, be that with tooling, training, library installation, or
+library selection. We've put a lot of effort into making
+[haskell-lang.org](https://haskell-lang.org) the destination for that
+goal. Hopefully haskell.org can converge on this goal in the future,
+but for now it's very likely to just present another obstacle. When
+you tell people to get started with Haskell, I strongly recommend
+linking to
+[https://haskell-lang.org/get-started](https://haskell-lang.org/get-started).