montanonic

Michael, you were one of the first bloggers I stumbled upon when I started my journey into programming 9 months ago. I've really enjoyed your insightful analyses, and among other things they've made me very wary and sceptical of hype and fads in tech, which I'm very grateful for (yay Haskell!).

Unlike a lot of people here, I know that you are not pretentious, just talented and self-aware enough to not want to dance around with bullshit and false-modesty. You seem to be a very honest person with lots of integrity.

My question kind-of builds upon this. As a self-described moralist, have you considered making your work targeted towards addressing moral issues, beyond just the moral concerns of office-place ethics?

Put more clearly: have you considered focusing on building technologies that are humanitarian first and foremost? I find one of the most depressing aspects of tech culture to be its horrid short-sightedness, a problem that likely stretches to Western-style business culture at large. So much effort is put into maximizing profit and rapid growth in fad markets, and so little on creating sustainable products that can continue to grow because they address real needs efficiently and ethically. We can see this manifest in the fad of open-sourcing only when it benefits the powerful company, and open-sourcing only as much as benefits the company; this in contrast to open-sourcing with the intent of empowering programmers to more rapidly create useful technologies, and taking ease of use and documentation seriously.

Computer Tech is such an amazingly powerful platform, and it just seems to me that there is an enormous landscape of untapped potential, untapped because the current culture constrains creativity. Do you feel similarly? If so, what type of culture would you like to see grow, and what might be some technologies that you'd want to see created or improved upon within such a culture?

Thank you for doing this AMA. It's really cool to be able to talk to you, and I really look forward to your response if you have the time.

I'd like to add though that Haskell has become insanely more tractable ever since http://haskellbook.com/. And I do hold the opinion, as others do, that it's easier to start with Haskell than to learn another language first and come to it (unless like me you start with something like Scala, in which case Haskell will be easier).