Why is Haskell used so little in the industry?

by truciouson 5/1/2012, 2:24:07 PM with 6 comments
  • by evmaron 5/1/2012, 3:05:05 PM

    I hate to ad hominem, but this guy is a known troll of the Haskell community. (I don't know the back story but I believe it's related to him running an OCaml consultancy; many former OCaml fans, myself included, discovered Haskell as "that language that's like OCaml but better".)

    Rather than downvote his posts or comments to oblivion, I recommend reading it all with a lot of skepticism.

    For one example, he claims it takes two days to install the Haskell compiler. I can refute that from personal experience, or you could just consider that it's really implausible anyone would ever try out such a language. (And then visit their downloads page and see it's the same as Ruby or whatever: apt-get install or download an installer and run it: http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/ )

    Edit: the post is from 2010. Present tense in the above is all wrong.

  • by ezyangon 5/1/2012, 3:02:13 PM

    I think Simon Marlow's comment sums it up. "Welcome to Jon Harrop's magic world where everything is not as it seems!"

  • by donson 5/1/2012, 3:29:52 PM

    Last time this was posted, this is what happened: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1396532

    It's full of nasty, personal attacks that have no place on this forum.

  • by minhajuddinon 5/1/2012, 3:43:42 PM

    I've been using an awesome haskell app (xmonad http://xmonad.org/) for a long time and haven't had any issues with it. It is quite popular. It's a neat tiling manager which helps me immensely. I am sure there are other haskell success stories.

    This article is very scary as the guy is throwing a lot of numbers, would love to see someone from Haskell post a rebuttal.

  • by revelationon 5/1/2012, 6:12:34 PM

    I think the problem is very simple. We don't like to admit it, but the largest amount of programming is not done solving hard problems, but instead writing around other peoples code, facilitating the use of other peoples systems and specifications.

    The programmers job is to facilitate the flow of information to get some desirable end result.

  • by debacleon 5/1/2012, 3:11:18 PM

    I don't mean to be cruel, but Haskell is simply not a good language for 2012. It feels like I'm programming for 1983, with the poor syntax and silly idioms.

    There's a reason that eight out of the ten top programming languages in use today are C or C descendants - C is a great language to read and write, and for 90% of programming tasks (and 99.9% of business programming tasks), how easy it is for the programmer to comprehend and express himself in the language is the biggest factor in productivity.