> I find that many functional programmers, including Haskell programmers, seem convinced that I will completely abandon C++ if only I spent the time to understand Haskell.
With enough work, you can accomplish any task in any language. The only thing you can't do is force yourself to use something you don't like. So I commend you for giving it a try, but I certainly don't begrudge you for not liking it or using it for everything.
Programming language proselytization is one of the most obnoxious things about our industry. We love to cloak our feelings in rational language, but at the end of the day, all of the design decisions in a language are choices that have upsides and downsides. Some of these upsides are going to be valuable to a particular user or a particular problem, a lot of them are going to be irrelevant and a few will be detrimental. The factor that determines success is absolutely the individual and not the language.
Believing your language is the best must help motivate people to use it, but it is definitely an irrational belief, and not a technical fact. Advertising language differences as factual improvements when they are, at best, assumptions derived from untested principles must be doing for our industry what snake oil has done for Western medicine.
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> I find that many functional programmers, including Haskell programmers, seem convinced that I will completely abandon C++ if only I spent the time to understand Haskell.
With enough work, you can accomplish any task in any language. The only thing you can't do is force yourself to use something you don't like. So I commend you for giving it a try, but I certainly don't begrudge you for not liking it or using it for everything.
Programming language proselytization is one of the most obnoxious things about our industry. We love to cloak our feelings in rational language, but at the end of the day, all of the design decisions in a language are choices that have upsides and downsides. Some of these upsides are going to be valuable to a particular user or a particular problem, a lot of them are going to be irrelevant and a few will be detrimental. The factor that determines success is absolutely the individual and not the language.
Believing your language is the best must help motivate people to use it, but it is definitely an irrational belief, and not a technical fact. Advertising language differences as factual improvements when they are, at best, assumptions derived from untested principles must be doing for our industry what snake oil has done for Western medicine.