The Evolution of a Haskell Programmer (2001)

Phase 1: There are no bugs because strong typing, no side effects, functional nature. Phase 2: OK, but those bugs are my own programmer errors. Phase 3: I admit it, I have no idea what I'm doing. Phase 4: OK, I can't even figure out what the Haskell I did two years ago was even trying to do. I was smarter then.

This reminds me of one of the closing remarks of Simon Peyton-Jones in his A History of Haskell talk[0]. "Haskell is great fun, it's rich enough to be useful but the thing that I think is really important about it is that it's a kind of playful language. It encourages people who want to play and so I've given some examples here about the sort of playing that people do embedded domain-specific language and cunning type programs, but it's a…

I am simultaneously intrigued by the possibilities of functional programming, and horrified by the ways it can take people off into the weeds. Were I to use Haskell in a real-world project with teammates, I'd have to keep an iron grip on the complexity of the code the team writes. Maintainability (mainly readability/comprehensibility as far as I'm concerned) is far more important for the kind of work I do than theoretical purity and hypothetical applicability to classes of problems the…

and here's a working link to the original "Evolution of a programmer": http://www.lri.fr/~filliatr/evolution