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I like Haskell but I see no future in terms of widespread adoption for it. The aim isn't necessarily widespread adoption, so much as the ability for people who

I like Haskell but I see no future in terms of widespread adoption for it. The aim isn't necessarily widespread adoption, so much as the ability for people who know it to use professionally. It's way past merely "production ready", but reputation is a lagging indicator and so most programmers are stuck doing Java... Since the goal is to avoid {success at all costs}, getting 25% market share is probably not possible. 1 percent would be a start. The problem, economically speaking, is that Haskell and Clojure engineers are massively underpaid, when you consider that an average Haskeller would be Principal+ at any Java shop. That's because the Java and C++ people can create bidding wars every year and spike their salaries, whereas using a better but more niche language makes that career strategy untenable. Haskell's laziness isn't as much of an issue as people make it out to be. You can have strictness any time you need it, so it's more akin to an opt-out model than laziness being forced upon the programmer. It is correct to observe that high-performance applications frequently have a lot of strictness annotations, and the argument can be made that high-performance Haskell (while it can be close to C in performance) isn't "idiomatic"... although that claim is true of all high-level languages (even Java). High-performance Clojure ends up being full of '^' characters for type annotations, and high-performance Haskell ends up being full of '!' characters for strictness.

LukeHoersten 11y ago
Great points. I can attest to the fact that low-latency Java code looks nothing like idiomatic Java. Ironically, the techniques for writing low latency Java are the same in Haskell (avoiding object creation, boxing, garbage collection, etc). High performance C and C++ are a league of their own with direct control over memory layout and alignment etc. Haskell has some amazing work on that front as well though: http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~dorchard/publ/icfp-2013-simd-vectorisation.pdf http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~dorchard/publ/icfp-2013-simd-vector...
mmarx 11y ago
> high-performance Haskell ends up being full of '!' characters for strictness. The upcoming GHC 8 provides the Strict extensions which makes everything strict by default on a per-module level. That should greatly reduce the number of »!« characters.
saosebastiao 11y ago
> The problem, economically speaking, is that Haskell and Clojure engineers are massively underpaid, when you consider that an average Haskeller would be Principal+ at any Java shop. That's because the Java and C++ people can create bidding wars every year and spike their salaries, whereas using a better but more niche language makes that career strategy untenable. I haven't found the same to be true for other languages, but in my experience the Average Haskeller is so caught up in academic exercises, technical one-upmanship, and code golf shenanigans that I'm surprised they find any time to contribute any business value at all. Having a discussion about acceptable levels of technical debt with a Haskeller is like having a discussion about acceptable levels of meat products in your diet with a vegan in a world where there are no plant foods..."everything is technical debt, and none of it is acceptable, and we absolutely can't move on until we change all relevant functors to applicatives and all nested record accesses to lenses!" And it is squarely a cultural issue, not a technical one...it is quite obvious that Haskell is a fantastically powerful language and capable of mowing over most enterprise-y languages with ease for a very wide variety of domains. Its just that Haskellers are so nitpicky about elegance and style that they don't know how to let shit be shit and get something done when it is needed. This obviously isn't the only case for Haskellers. Looking at JGM's github feels like looking at Dumbledore's magic through the eyes of a Muggle. It just feels that way with the average Haskeller that I work with.
- mbrock 11y ago
  I don't know who the average Haskeller is, but your description doesn't fit any of the engineers I worked with at Silk, who were all very pragmatic and got stuff done quickly.

LukeHoersten 11y ago

Great points. I can attest to the fact that low-latency Java code looks nothing like idiomatic Java. Ironically, the techniques for writing low latency Java are the same in Haskell (avoiding object creation, boxing, garbage collection, etc). High performance C and C++ are a league of their own with direct control over memory layout and alignment etc. Haskell has some amazing work on that front as well though: http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~dorchard/publ/icfp-2013-simd-vectorisation.pdf http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~dorchard/publ/icfp-2013-simd-vector...

mmarx 11y ago

> high-performance Haskell ends up being full of '!' characters for strictness. The upcoming GHC 8 provides the Strict extensions which makes everything strict by default on a per-module level. That should greatly reduce the number of »!« characters.

saosebastiao 11y ago

> The problem, economically speaking, is that Haskell and Clojure engineers are massively underpaid, when you consider that an average Haskeller would be Principal+ at any Java shop. That's because the Java and C++ people can create bidding wars every year and spike their salaries, whereas using a better but more niche language makes that career strategy untenable. I haven't found the same to be true for other languages, but in my experience the Average Haskeller is so caught up in academic exercises, technical one-upmanship, and code golf shenanigans that I'm surprised they find any time to contribute any business value at all. Having a discussion about acceptable levels of technical debt with a Haskeller is like having a discussion about acceptable levels of meat products in your diet with a vegan in a world where there are no plant foods..."everything is technical debt, and none of it is acceptable, and we absolutely can't move on until we change all relevant functors to applicatives and all nested record accesses to lenses!" And it is squarely a cultural issue, not a technical one...it is quite obvious that Haskell is a fantastically powerful language and capable of mowing over most enterprise-y languages with ease for a very wide variety of domains. Its just that Haskellers are so nitpicky about elegance and style that they don't know how to let shit be shit and get something done when it is needed. This obviously isn't the only case for Haskellers. Looking at JGM's github feels like looking at Dumbledore's magic through the eyes of a Muggle. It just feels that way with the average Haskeller that I work with.

mbrock 11y ago
I don't know who the average Haskeller is, but your description doesn't fit any of the engineers I worked with at Silk, who were all very pragmatic and got stuff done quickly.