The way I tend to picture roles in software is in analogy to my old job in aerospace.
We have scientists/researchers who focus on the theoretical aspects. We have engineers who have a reasonable understanding of the theoretical aspects and tend to work in the design space. And we have craftsmen/technicians who have a reasonable understanding of design and tend to spend most of their time coding.
A sort of pastime of mine is to follow arguments on technical subjects and see if I can see these groups talking at cross purposes because they see the world from their perspective. Although if it relates to Haskell I don't bother as it's a gimme.
Where I do see a difference between software and aerospace is that, in software, there's a more noticeable feeling of hierarchy. To paraphrase: Haskellers look down on C programmers look down on Javascript programmers (like some sort of geeks' That Was The Week That Was sketch).
Maybe it was like this in aero too (I was quite young). What I do know is that I was in awe of the skills of the crafties I worked with. Unless you've watched a chap spray paint a propeller to a finer tolerance than a purpose built robot, you only have a partial understanding of the word exquisite.
The reason I find Haskell interesting is precisely that it's the only place I know where the theoretically-minded and the practically-minded get together and interpollinate. Everywhere else the one group pretty much just sneers at the other. If it doesn't always go 100% smoothly in Haskell-land, well, it's not as if we collectively have a lot of practice in getting along across that boundary.
Consequently, Haskell is one of the few places where any interesting progress is being made in the field of programming. The pure theoreticals continue spinning off into ever-more-rarified lands of type theory that are already all but impossible to use in practice, and the practicals are stuck shuffling around the same things over and over again in the same basic languages they've had since the late 1990s, just with a few more fancier curlicues added. (Every once in a while they'll import an idea from the academic side, but not without pretending they came up with it on their own while still sneering at the very thought that maybe if one thing was useful from over there, other things might be useful too....)
(Rust may someday also be an exception, though I'm currently unsure whether Rust's community will make progress in the general field of programming, or whether they'll make Rust-specific progress. A certain amount of Rust-specific progress is required either way before we can tell.)
Very insightful comment, thanks. I've never thought of things that way before. I guess the practice/theory intersection explains what I find so appealing about Haskell.
We have scientists/researchers who focus on the theoretical aspects. We have engineers who have a reasonable understanding of the theoretical aspects and tend to work in the design space. And we have craftsmen/technicians who have a reasonable understanding of design and tend to spend most of their time coding.
A sort of pastime of mine is to follow arguments on technical subjects and see if I can see these groups talking at cross purposes because they see the world from their perspective. Although if it relates to Haskell I don't bother as it's a gimme.
Where I do see a difference between software and aerospace is that, in software, there's a more noticeable feeling of hierarchy. To paraphrase: Haskellers look down on C programmers look down on Javascript programmers (like some sort of geeks' That Was The Week That Was sketch).
Maybe it was like this in aero too (I was quite young). What I do know is that I was in awe of the skills of the crafties I worked with. Unless you've watched a chap spray paint a propeller to a finer tolerance than a purpose built robot, you only have a partial understanding of the word exquisite.