16 July 2014
Edit on 18 Jan 2024:
I have a more nuanced perspective now. Some tools are better than others. At the same time, some not-so-great tools are easier to understand and easier to hire for, so a business owner is more likely to choose them, and that's ok. If you want to provide an alternative, address their concerns.
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I don't know exactly what I want to write here, I just know I want to write something. After 4 years of programming, I feel that I'm losing patience for some things. I don't feel like dealing with the same bugs all the time, the same broken systems, the same shitty languages or technologies. Now, I've mostly been using Python, which I don't consider shitty. Still, its dynamic typing means that so many things aren't caught until run time and this is frustrating. I want to develop more and debug less.
Haskell seems to be more of what I want. Unfortunately, I'm not yet productive with it and I haven't been putting in the time to change that lately. It's a very good feeling to have a pretty high certainty that your program will work without an error if it compiled. This is the feeling that Haskell gives me.
JavaScript is another shitty thing I don't want to be dealing with much. Purescript seems to be an alternative from the functional space, but I haven't checked it out yet. Ideally, my stack will be Haskell + Purescript and I hope it will reduce the number of bugs in my code. For my personal projects I care more about having a good stack than using a technology that a lot of people know. I want to spend less time yak shaving and more time developing features.