by shevy-java | 2026-02-08 09:50:45+00:00
> I believe there is a lot of untapped potential in AI-assisted coding tools

Yikes.

By the way, the whole website is strange. Just the name alone "haskell for all".

Many years ago when I tried to learn Haskell (and wrote some haskell code that worked but it was sooooo much harder when compared to ruby or python), one of the few things that appeared early on, aside from the monad barrier, was that many haskell people said that Haskell is deliberately not for everyone. Back then this was when IRC was still en vogue, so I "heard" that via various discussions on #haskell.

I did not fully understand this part, because ... why would you write a language that only a few big brain people could use? I found that elitistic and snobbish, even arrogant.

Only at a later time did I understand one part of the meaning. The "we don't want you here" also means "we don't want YOU to change haskell into some other new meta-variant". I understood this much better when some guys wanted to have ruby embrace types. Then I understood that people not only want to change a language but also want to ruin it; whether on purpose or because they prefer something else (such as their brain embraced types-only code bases) is a separate discussion. I still find the haskell attitude very elitistic but I at the least understand that they don't want everyone to use - and change - Haskell.

> For example, someone who was new to Haskell could edit a Haskell file “as Python” and then after finishing their edits the AI attempts to back-propagate their changes to Haskell.

I like the general idea behind "write in any language, have it work in EVERY language". But the whole AI movement seems more about trying to dumb down people really or make them lazy, in many ways. I have seen people use it to great effect, so I am not at all saying AI has no use cases. What I am however had noticing is that it made many normal folks super-lazy. They type on their smartphone, solution comes out, task finished, move on. That's not necessarily only bad, but it comes with trade-offs. My approach is much slower, but it is systematic and I am in full control of what is documented how and where.

> This is obviously not a comprehensive list of ideas, but I wrote this to encourage people to think of more innovative ways to incorporate AI into people's workflows

Oh he has achieved this in a different way. Now I have another reason to not want AI in my "workflows". The whole website also seems super-strange to me. Has he used AI to write the whole content and layout? It's hard to say because I don't know how it used to be in the past, but the paragraphs and the content seem so strange. I suspect he used AI to generate the layout too; and some of the content as well. We are losing "interaction" with real humans here too (ok ok, there is not a lot of interaction with regards to a static website, but if a blog is written by AI, then that is not really any possibility for interaction with a human - you could not even distinguish WHO wrote the content or made the decisions such as which style to choose and so forth; it looks very fake to me or, at the least, in part. I typically don't see this with other blogs.).