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I also have ~20 years experience developing software. I have worked on 10+ MLOC Java and C++ systems at UBS, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers and

by willtim 10y ago

I also have ~20 years experience developing software. I have worked on 10+ MLOC Java and C++ systems at UBS, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers and others. I came to Haskell precisely because of my experience working on such large scale systems with mainstream languages. I have spent the last 4 years as a professional Haskell developer, first at Barclays, now at SCB. While I could probably stomach giving up purity in a small project, you'd only be able to take away sum types and pattern matching from my cold dead hands.

pron 10y ago
Personally, I am a bit skeptical of language-level features in general (as opposed to runtime features) to provide significant benefit compared to their high cost[1], and doubly so in general purpose languages, but that is precisely why I am interested in good technical reports about the pros and cons of languages, and those are sorely missing. At this point, whatever public information we do have seems to suggest that no company is significantly better than most others when it comes to delivering complex large software. There are a few exceptions where specific attributes are concerned. For example, Altran UK (Praxis) do seem to be rather exceptional in their ability to provide large verified software (they use Z for specification and Ada SPARK for coding), and they do have technical reports that are not completely devoid of useful information. [1]: This isn't even about a particular language (although different languages do have different cost of adoption). Any language that doesn't have excellent interop with existing libraries and legacy code has a very high cost of adoption (and yeah, we've tried Scala years ago, and the experience was far from good).