You're assuming that difficulty is a single constant, which is definitely not the case. The real state of things is that Haskell is more difficult than Ruby to get really good at, but the actual work of developing things in Ruby is much more difficult than developing things in Haskell. This is because when you develop things in Ruby, you spend a lot of time debugging heisenbugs due to the total lack of referential transparency.
Accordingly, yes, newcomers to Haskell will probably have difficulty understanding what the type system is telling them, and this will slow them down a bit. But analogously, newcomers to Ruby (especially those using a heavyweight framework) will have difficulty figuring out why their application is doing what it is, and this will slow them down a lot.
(Source: I've worked professionally in both languages.)
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Well, New Ruby developers doesn't have the same problem. They can move much faster than the initial uphill struggle that is Haskell.
Essentially, there are three sitations:
a) Everything is of the same difficulty. b) Haskell is more difficult than Ruby. c) Ruby is more difficult than Haskell.
I'd say (b) is a much saner conclusion.
You're assuming that difficulty is a single constant, which is definitely not the case. The real state of things is that Haskell is more difficult than Ruby to get really good at, but the actual work of developing things in Ruby is much more difficult than developing things in Haskell. This is because when you develop things in Ruby, you spend a lot of time debugging heisenbugs due to the total lack of referential transparency.
Accordingly, yes, newcomers to Haskell will probably have difficulty understanding what the type system is telling them, and this will slow them down a bit. But analogously, newcomers to Ruby (especially those using a heavyweight framework) will have difficulty figuring out why their application is doing what it is, and this will slow them down a lot.
(Source: I've worked professionally in both languages.)
Today I learned that a bug of which you can only know either its position or its velocity but not both to any significant degree, is a heisenbug.
I'm not sure if you're joking, but Heisenbug is used to mean "bug that changes when you try to observe it".
I think You are assuming that the learner here is already a (imperative or OOP categorized) programmer who is willing to learn these two languages.
For ruby still there would be some topics you need to know about before trying to learn language itself, if you are just starting out.
"You are assuming that the learner here is already a (imperative or OOP categorized) programmer who is willing to learn these two languages."
To be fair, that is not an uncommon situation.
agreed