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My jaw actually dropped when they said "they used a programming language called Haskell." Were all my prejudices against the business practicality of functiona

by PlzSnow 11y ago

My jaw actually dropped when they said "they used a programming language called Haskell." Were all my prejudices against the business practicality of functional languages wrong? Nope. "Biilmann no longer uses Haskell. It’s not entirely practical." EDIT: ... and to say, if Facebook can't attract superstar Haskell programmers, then what chance any other startup?

tikhonj 11y ago
Biilmann isn't at Facebook; he's just some random developer at a startup with experience in different languages who once used Haskell for a work project. He may as well be yet another HN commenter, and it isn't surprising that not everyone who has tried Haskell is using it! The reporter probably just found him easier to interview than the people actively using Haskell, for whatever reason. Haskell at Facebook is still going strong with, I believe, two teams using it and actively recruiting. (I've been contacted by a recruiter myself, even.) And they've hired Simon Marlowe and Bryan O'Sullivan who are pretty much as superstar as they come. Recruiting woes are greatly exaggerated if not inverted for startups seeking a handful of engineers—Haskell actively attracts interesting candidates.
- bobfunk 11y ago
  Biilmann here, I'm definitively not at Facebook no :) I've run Haskell services in production for more than 4 years and still operate 4 of them to this date. I also contributed the wai-eventsource module to the Yesod project and build a Haskell powered eventsource addon for Heroku. It's not my impression that there are tons of other people in the bay area with as much experience in actually using Haskell for real world production stuff. Most of them are probably at Facebook now and the journalist behind the article did interview them... That said, it's absolutely true that for Netlify I now use Go for the tasks I would have used Haskell for earlier. Haskell is an awesome, mindblowing language, and when I started using it for production tasks it was by far the best tool for the job at the time. By now, however, Go is a far more pragmatic choice for most of the tasks I used Haskell for before. Unless your whole stack is Haskell based, the context switching involved in going back and forth between more traditional languages and Haskell are really brutal. Apart from that, it's very easy to bring someone new onto a team and teach them enough Go to be productive in a day or two. You just can't do that with Haskell. That said, it looks like a really, really good fit for what they're doing at Facebook with regards to spam filtering. I can totally see how you can make a safe DSL for rules that will be statically type checked and handle concurrency without any need for developers to think about it, and the Haskell runtime is incredible for these kind of things.
codygman 11y ago
If you want to attract Haskell programmers, simply allow working remotely.
- tluyben2 11y ago
  That is exactly it; I know plenty (including myself) but relocating for a job is not of this day and age (travelling for team meetups is another story obviously). And obviously less obscure languages have more opportunities for working remotely.

by PlzSnow 11y ago

tikhonj 11y ago

Biilmann isn't at Facebook; he's just some random developer at a startup with experience in different languages who once used Haskell for a work project. He may as well be yet another HN commenter, and it isn't surprising that not everyone who has tried Haskell is using it! The reporter probably just found him easier to interview than the people actively using Haskell, for whatever reason. Haskell at Facebook is still going strong with, I believe, two teams using it and actively recruiting. (I've been contacted by a recruiter myself, even.) And they've hired Simon Marlowe and Bryan O'Sullivan who are pretty much as superstar as they come. Recruiting woes are greatly exaggerated if not inverted for startups seeking a handful of engineers—Haskell actively attracts interesting candidates.

bobfunk 11y ago
Biilmann here, I'm definitively not at Facebook no :) I've run Haskell services in production for more than 4 years and still operate 4 of them to this date. I also contributed the wai-eventsource module to the Yesod project and build a Haskell powered eventsource addon for Heroku. It's not my impression that there are tons of other people in the bay area with as much experience in actually using Haskell for real world production stuff. Most of them are probably at Facebook now and the journalist behind the article did interview them... That said, it's absolutely true that for Netlify I now use Go for the tasks I would have used Haskell for earlier. Haskell is an awesome, mindblowing language, and when I started using it for production tasks it was by far the best tool for the job at the time. By now, however, Go is a far more pragmatic choice for most of the tasks I used Haskell for before. Unless your whole stack is Haskell based, the context switching involved in going back and forth between more traditional languages and Haskell are really brutal. Apart from that, it's very easy to bring someone new onto a team and teach them enough Go to be productive in a day or two. You just can't do that with Haskell. That said, it looks like a really, really good fit for what they're doing at Facebook with regards to spam filtering. I can totally see how you can make a safe DSL for rules that will be statically type checked and handle concurrency without any need for developers to think about it, and the Haskell runtime is incredible for these kind of things.

codygman 11y ago

If you want to attract Haskell programmers, simply allow working remotely.

tluyben2 11y ago
That is exactly it; I know plenty (including myself) but relocating for a job is not of this day and age (travelling for team meetups is another story obviously). And obviously less obscure languages have more opportunities for working remotely.