It's worth pointing out that the presenter's first language was Haskell and he's been coding in it for over a decade.
LYAH won't get you from apples to expert in weeks, much less months; more likely years.
Consider me skeptical -- needing to build the latest and greatest of Haskell [7.8] from source on a modern Linux distro (CentOS binary with antiquated libgmp.so.3 dependency, seriously?) is a gigantic PITA compared to virtually every other language where you just download a standlaone binary of latest & greatest from langugage X, modify your PATH, and hit the ground running.
Why do you need to build the latest and greatest? Building the very latest gcc/clang is also going to be a PITA. In either case, there's a perfectly servicable binary distribution and the stuff packaged in my OS's repo is still plenty usable.
> Why do you need to build the latest and greatest?
Why shouldn't I? When Scala 2.11 was released I downloaded the binary, changed my PATH, fired up a new terminal and started exploring the latest release. Takes 2 minutes or so.
I'd like to do the same with Haskell. 7.8 looks to have significant language improvements that I want to explore vs. read about and be stuck on 7.4.1 (Fedora 18's provided version).
Indeed I did just that, the issue is that the only binary distributions for Linux are CentOS 6 and some flavor of Debian, both of which are dinosaurs compared to any modern distro. The long and short is the installation fails due to a missing dependency on antiquated libgmp.so.3, thus cooking my CPU for an hour and building from source.
If you want to talk about barriers to Haskell adoption, this is certainly one of them.
"both of which are dinosaurs compared to any modern distro."
Without any clue of what constitutes "any modern distro" in your mind, I don't see how this can proceed further. Note that Centos 6.5 and Debian wheezy are the latest from their respective projects. I believe the Debian version will happily install under recent Ubuntu and derivatives.
I'm sorry your preferred distro doesn't have better support.
LYAH won't get you from apples to expert in weeks, much less months; more likely years.
Consider me skeptical -- needing to build the latest and greatest of Haskell [7.8] from source on a modern Linux distro (CentOS binary with antiquated libgmp.so.3 dependency, seriously?) is a gigantic PITA compared to virtually every other language where you just download a standlaone binary of latest & greatest from langugage X, modify your PATH, and hit the ground running.