Konfy
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2020–2023
41:53 · 8.5K views · Aug 13, 2020
Gabriella Gonzalez argues that developers misunderstand marketing as deception or hype, and applies the technology-adoption ideas of Crossing the Chasm to Haskell. She looks at what keeps Haskell from reaching mainstream programmers and what a community can do about it.
Commenters point to it as a clear take on why functional languages stall outside niches, and its lessons are seen as applying to any technology trying to go mainstream.
5 comments from Hacker News
The reason why Haskell still doesn't really break through in the corporate world is not a failure of arrogance, but a marketing failure in the strictest sense of the word 'marketing'—which means prioritizing the right features to target the right market. A large proportion of the talk linked below is based on the book “Crossing the Chasm". The book was originally written for startups trying to break into the mainstream, and this talk adopts that book to programming laguage (or tools more generally), particularly regarding Haskell. Gabriel Gonzalez – How to market Haskell to a mainstream programmer: this video Gabriel also suggests that in order to "cross the chasm" you have to offer a best-in-class experience in some area, and suggests that Haskellers adapt the language to facilitating building interpreters, which is it particularly well suited for. So, base on the above, I don't think the OP's emphasis on the emotional analysis of Haskell programmers is anything more than the OP's just-so story, although the notion of parochialism may have some crossover with the concept of marketing.
> compelling framework Sadly no. There are contenders for this that have arisen over the years, but we don’t have a RoR for Haskell yet. If you’re curious, here is a talk that goes into this problem. It’s very accessible IMO. this video To be honest, the compelling reason to learn Haskell for me was so I could engage with various academic literature. I just kept running into things I didn’t understand which were tangential to the topic of the paper, and it seemed like the most straightforward way to solve this was to start with learning Haskell. Once I learned it, I realized I was wrong in my biases, and Haskell is a fantastic tool for normal programming, with some important caveats.
The reason why FP still doesn't really break through in the corporate world is a marketing failure, in the strictest sense of the word marketing, which means prioritizing the right features to target the right market. A large proportion of this talk is based on the book “Crossing the Chasm". The book was originally written for startups, and this talk adopts the book to an open source audience, especially Haskell developers. Gabriel Gonzalez – How to market Haskell to a mainstream programmer: this video
this is also a good talk in a similar vein, although aimed at haskell programmers, is really about any technology looking to grow into the mainstream Gabriel Gonzalez – How to market Haskell to a mainstream programmer - this video
There is now (well, 2020) a Haskell version of this idea (Moore's "Crossing the Chasm") too, as a conference talk: this video