The interesting thing this brings up is whether programming hiring is too specific. Why do we hire reactjs programmers with e-commerce experience instead of react programmers, e-commerce programmers, or programmers?

To me this guy sounds like he could do anything, just see if he's easy to work with and see if he likes your domain. He's certainly said enough about programming over the years that he shouldn't need a leetcode grilling.

Anyway my point was it can get quite narrow what we look for in a coder when in fact some broad experience might be just what is necessary. For instance I've coded apps for iPhone and Android despite being ostensibly a back end financial trader. I'd think a lot of coders wouldn't want to be siloed into the first thing they get a job in.

We don’t like to talk about this: but modulo all the usual turf wars around libraries and attribution and where the braces go: serious Haskell people skew smart and capable.

This comes with downsides around dicking around with trying to jam every part of the computation into the type system (not unlike C++ template meta programming).

But net/net, when a GHC contributor rolls up his or her sleeves, they on average have a bigger range than people who argue about ReactJS vs Ember.

Source: worked on one of the biggest production Haskell code bases on Earth, was involved in early design discussions on both React and Ember, and wrote big pieces of an ECMA-262 compiler/VM.

Haskell people skew smarter than most other languages.

Sorry for saying it out loud.

I think serious $language people for any $language skew smart and capable. I'm not sure that the top 10% in any language (by whatever metric you choose to measure overall quality) are going to be significant more or less smart and capable than in any other language.

Disclaimer: I have minimal exposure to Haskell or Haskell programmers, so this opinion is predicated upon my experience with programmers of many other languages, not Haskell in particular, so I could be completely wrong.

Yeah I have no particular axe to grind on Haskell’s behalf. I’m a Lisp guy who has to write C++ all day like everyone else.

Lazy is a ridiculous default, the combinatorial explosion created by GHC extensions makes C compiler quirks look like a gentle massage in comparison, and building Haskell is a friggin migraine on wheels.

But for whatever reason, those folks are on average in my experience, serious as a heart attack.