Comments on: Why we use Haskell

By: Eklerks

Eklerks — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 16:52:14 +0000

@Andrew Bettison

At our company we use Snap -haskell web framework- and it is actually quite easy to create very complex software. We wrote our own connection pool -for the database and the application servers-, (realtime) monitoring software, a proxy server/load-balancer, a special monad in which database transactions are enforced, all kind of concurrent data structures etc. Especially concurrency (with STM) is a breeze.

Before that we rolled our own webserver, but Snap does a better job, so we abandoned it.

The proxy server is really efficient, it adds, under normal load, a lag of 5 ms to the response of the backend servers. -Same network- Thanks to enumerators, the body of the request is send to the backend servers before we received to whole request from the client.

All things you wouldn’t dare to do in most of the script languages, for e.g. sake of stability and maintainability, are actually easy in haskell.

For web development haskell is a very sound choice. Finding programmers is difficult, but most people with a mathematical background pick it up quickly.

By: Erik

Erik — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 22:04:20 +0000

@Mac: We never seriously considered Scala. We do think it’s an interesting and worthwhile language. Like F#, a functional language on a platform with lots of libraries has lots of potential. They’re not pure, though, which gives us a lot. As an example, Haskell is the only language so far where STM works.

By: Mac

Mac — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 16:07:39 +0000

Did you ever consider Scala? If yes why did you choose Haskel, was it because you were already familiar with it or there are some advantages? Thanks for the insightful post and good luck!

By: Nick van der Veeken

Nick van der Veeken — Tue, 24 May 2011 23:40:17 +0000

Just came back from a tech talk on Scala by the inventor himself, Martin Odersky. He proudly explained how Twitter, LinkedIn and many other large-on-the-net companies use Scala for their backend and how for Twitter this meant saying goodbye to the fail whale that Ruby had brought them. Just saying: It’s proven technology.

Porting code from Haskell to Scala should be easy, since you are working functionally already.

But anyhow, happy coding ;-)

By: Erik

Erik — Mon, 02 May 2011 09:33:43 +0000

@Matt: We were already familiar with Haskell, I think that influenced our choice the most. But another reason is that OCaml, F# and Scala are impure by default, which removes one of the advantages of Haskell and prohibits some techniques (e.g. STM). I also think Haskell’s community is larger at the moment, though with Scala and F# you have the benefit of existing Java and .NET libraries.

By: Erik

Erik — Mon, 02 May 2011 09:30:28 +0000

@Chad: We use Happstack. See Sebas' answer on reddit for more details.

By: Andrew Bettison

Andrew Bettison — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 23:00:46 +0000

You are early adopters, and you will suffer for it, so you have my best wishes and condolences at the same time. I think that in the long run, pure functional languages like Haskell will be our way out of the software complexity “crisis” (and into the next one :-), so your decision is progressive and deserves respect.

By: Clint Moore

Clint Moore — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 17:21:32 +0000

From one startup who has committed to going with haskell to another, we wish you the best of luck.

By: xyzzy

xyzzy — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 13:09:11 +0000

jorge: your post is BS. The very first line of the translation references the original article and gives the original author’s name.

By: Carsten

Carsten — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 10:11:59 +0000

I really like Haskell and I wish I could make my living programming in big H but to be honest: it just lacks most things that make my work managable.
I get money for producing .net code, so I’m used to have really good editors and tooling – great debugers and tracers, etc.
I would miss those things a lot.

But it’s not that bad really – I still can use F#. While it’s lacking some cool stuff like type classes and real purity it comes with the full .net-stack and most of the great tooling VS offers.

Closure might be another option (for Java or .net) and to be honest – I would have settled with one of these two.

But good luck for you guys anyway – will follow you on twitter ;)

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 07:12:52 +0000

I’m a FP fan but lack Haskell experience. Would you also care to comment on your choice of Haskell over other statically-compiled FP languages like OCaml, Scala etc? OCaml is what I know best, am keen to hear more about others’ FP experiences…thanks for the insightful post!

By: Daniel

Daniel — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 03:48:00 +0000

I’ll add my +1 to the “what framework are you using”? Best of luck on your project!

By: Jonathan Mugan

Jonathan Mugan — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 22:50:30 +0000

Great post. It’s nice to see a description of functional programming that is understandable by people who are not already functional programmers.

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 22:09:48 +0000

I second Chad’s question about the web framework you’re using…

By: Chad

Chad — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 20:12:50 +0000

Are you guys using one of the established web frameworks (snap, yesod, etc.) or did you roll your own?

By: jorge

jorge — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 20:00:07 +0000

i think that “polish translation” is BS. the guy copied your content, and put himself down as the author. lame.

By: Loz

Loz — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 19:24:02 +0000

You can refactor “You can often be sure” into “You can’t be sure”

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 23:24:45 +0000

Congratulations on your choice of Haskell!

For me, your last statement may well be the most important one: “Haskell makes programming fun!”

By: tl

tl — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 03:31:00 +0000

Goodluck, guys!
Hope to see more posts about your experience on running Haskell as a company’s primary language.
-tl

By: Aleksandr Vinokurov

Aleksandr Vinokurov — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 19:31:02 +0000

iAloha! It’s really nice to read such motivating essays about functional programming, so rare to be used for commercial development today. Thank you.