# Haskell Researchers Announce Discovery of Industry Programmer Who Gives a Shit

DevFeed: [Haskell Researchers Announce Discovery of Industry Programmer Who Gives a Shit](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/haskell-researchers-announce-discovery-of-industry-programmer-who-gives-a-shit-38774.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/12/haskell-researchers-announce-discovery.html>)

Author: Steve Yegge (noreply@blogger.com)

Published: 2010-12-01T21:16:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Steve Yegge](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/steve-yegge.md>)

Topics: [Haskell](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/haskell.md>), [Java](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/java.md>), [Reddit](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/reddit.md>), [Computer science](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/computer-science.md>)

Tags: [computer-science](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/computer-science.md>), [haskell](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/haskell.md>), [java](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/java.md>), [reddit](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/reddit.md>)

## AI overview

A satirical article describes Haskell researchers allegedly discovering Seth Briars, an industry Java programmer who follows Haskell news. It uses the fictional investigation to joke about Haskell's small community, Reddit voting, type systems, and programming culture.

## Source excerpt

The worldwide Haskell community met up over beers today to celebrate their unprecedented discovery of an industry programmer who gives a shit about Haskell. On Wednesday, researchers issued a press release revealing that 27-year-old Seth Briars of North Carolina, a Java programmer at Blackwater accounting firm Ross and Fordham, actually gives a shit about Haskell. "Mr. Briars has followed every single one of our press releases for years," the press release stated. "Probably even this one." Haskell researcher Dutch Van Der Linde explained how they had stumbled on the theoretical possibility of Briars and his persistent interest in Haskell. "We knew that there are precisely 38 people who give a shit about Haskell," said Van Der Linde, "because every Haskell-related reddit post gets exactly 38 upvotes. It's a pure, deterministic function of no arguments -- that is, the result is independent of what we actually announce. But there are only 37 of us on our mailing list, so we figured there was a lurker somewhere." "That, or it was an off-by-1 error not detectable by our type system," Van Der Linde added. "But we don't, uh, like to dwell on, I mean with good unit testing practices we can, um... sorry, I need to get some water." As Van Der Linde stumbled off in a coughing fit, his fellow researcher Bonnie MacFarlane outlined their basic dilemma: "Finding a person who gives a shit about Haskell is an inherently NP-complete computer science problem. It's similar in scope and complexity to the problem of trying to find a tenured academic who didn't have the bulk of his or her work done by uncredited graduate students. So even though we suspected Briars existed, we needed a strategy to smoke him out." She explained the trap they set for Briars: "We crafted a fake satirical post lampooning Haskell as an unusable, overly complex turd -- a writing task that was emotionally difficult but conceptually trivial. Then we laced the post with deeper social subtext decrying the endemic s