58 lines
3 KiB
Markdown
58 lines
3 KiB
Markdown
I've probably blogged, spoken, Tweeted, and commented on a variation
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on this theme many times in the past, so please excuse me for being a
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broken record. This is important.
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I think we have a problem in the Haskell community. We all know that
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using Haskell to create a simple web service, a CRUD app, a
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[statically linked command line tool](https://twitter.com/pdxleif/status/855302710928613376),
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or a dozen other things is not only possible, but commonplace,
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trivial, and not even noteworthy. So we don't bother commenting when
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we create
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[general purpose reverse proxy tools](https://github.com/fpco/wai-middleware-crowd)
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with
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[prebuilt Docker images](https://hub.docker.com/r/fpco/wai-crowd/) for
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auth-enabling arbitrary webapps. It's boring. Unfortunately, __people
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outside our community don't know this__. By not bothering to talk
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about this (for us) boring topic, we're hiding away the fact that
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Haskell is a practical language for creating real things.
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Instead, we like to talk about
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[better preludes](http://www.snoyman.com/blog/2017/01/safe-prelude-a-thought-experiment),
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[optimizing common functions](http://www.snoyman.com/blog/2017/01/foldable-mapm-maybe-and-recursive-functions),
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or
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[dangers in our standard libraries](http://www.snoyman.com/blog/2016/12/beware-of-readfile). I'm
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picking on myself here with these examples, but my comments apply far
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more generally.
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I know personally at least 10-15 Haskell success stories that have
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never been talked about publicly. And I have to apologize for not
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leading by example here; unfortunately most of my work in the past few
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years has either been under NDA, or been of absolutely no interest to
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people outside the Haskell community (usually open source
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infrastructure and libraries). So I'm hoping to inspire others to step
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up to the plate.
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I'm not trying to tell anyone to stop talking about the things we find
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interesting. I just want to point out that just because we, within the
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Haskell community, may not find a "I launched a web service, and it's
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running, and it's not as buggy as we would have expected v1 to be"
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kind of blog post noteworthy, I think others _will_. These kinds of
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blog posts are also a much easier way to get started talking publicly
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about Haskell, since not all of us can explain zygohistomorphic
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prepomorphisms (I know I certainly can't).
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As I was batting the idea for this post around with
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[my wife](https://twitter.com/LambdaMom) last night, she pointed out
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that, most likely, the people best suited to write these kinds of
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posts may not have dedicated blogs at all right now. If you fall into
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that category, but would still be interested in writing up a post
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about your Haskell success story, I'd like to offer assistance. I'm
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happy to let guests write posts on the
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[Yesod blog](http://www.yesodweb.com/blog). Articles may also be
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relevant to [haskell-lang.org](https://haskell-lang.org). And we've
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run Haskell experience reports on
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[FP Complete's website](https://www.fpcomplete.com) many times in the
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past.
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I hope this time around this message had a bit of a different twist,
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and maybe can hit a different group of readers.
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