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I strongly prefer having examples, too, but I doubt it’s due to any kind of “superiority complex” that docs are lacking. Writing good docs takes work, and some

I strongly prefer having examples, too, but I doubt it’s due to any kind of “superiority complex” that docs are lacking. Writing good docs takes work, and some library authors are more willing to put in that work than others. Well-designed types can give you a great deal of what you’d get from docs in other languages, but they aren’t a panacea. Now, I find it very hard to believe that you’ve never heard of a practical use for Haskell. Do you just not care about the things that companies are using it for? (Compilers, web apps, backend services, finance, educational apps…)

armitron 10y ago
Can you name a single, widely used (outside the Haskell camp) opensource application written in Haskell? I can only think of "darcs" which for all intents and purposes was a failure. IIRC, one of the darcs retrospectives I've read, pointed out that GHC runtime behavior and its hard-to-foresee and hard-to-measure complexity properties, was a problem. Moreover, another high-profile failure that springs to mind, is Joel Reymont (wagerlabs.com) trying to write a high-performance poker server in Haskell and eventually abandoning it in disgust due to non-predictable behavior of the GHC runtime. He delivered it (with assorted paeans) in Erlang instead, which proved quite lucrative for him. I used Haskell for 2 years during my undergraduate degree, for program analysis. It was a good choice for such a theoretical domain. Some time later, I had another look at applying it to more practical problems. Besides the slight turn-off due to cultish behavior - which is also obvious in this thread, many posts excuse the lack of documentation or posit it as not a problem (!?), if not outright exalt it! - I got from the community itself, the language felt completely sterile and - most importantly - not fun. The syntax is also atrocious. I concluded that if static typing was needed, I would pick ML every single time over Haskell. I also have no affinity with Haskell's type system (in the sense that it leads to better programs) or its interactive nature (laughable compared to Lisp/Smalltalk). I also remember something Sussman said, "Haskell is the most advanced of the obsolete languages" [1], and can't help but chuckle. [1] https://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-How-To-Compute https://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-How-...
- sjakobi 10y ago
  > Can you name a single, widely used (outside the Haskell camp) opensource application written in Haskell? How about pandoc, PostgREST, git-annex, the Elm compiler? You can find more examples here: https://github.com/Gabriel439/post-rfc/blob/master/sotu.md https://github.com/Gabriel439/post-rfc/blob/master/sotu.md
  - sjakobi 10y ago
    What's the reason for the downvotes?
- codygman 10y ago
  https://github.com/Microsoft/bond https://github.com/Microsoft/bond
- greenrd 10y ago
  Darcs was mostly a failure because no-one, not even the original author, could satisfactorily explain its patch model - whereas git's patch model is simple and easy to understand. That has nothing to do with Haskell.
- PopsiclePete 10y ago
  The only piece of Haskell I rely on is Pandoc. Which is awesome. But I think hardly a shining example of "Look what you can do in Haskell that you can't do in X!"
- vanessa98 10y ago
  Oh man, please don't ever use Joel Reymont as a language reference - his noisy, uninformed, continuous churn through various programming languages was exhausting back in the day. Just be thankful the hack has gone quiet.

armitron 10y ago

Can you name a single, widely used (outside the Haskell camp) opensource application written in Haskell? I can only think of "darcs" which for all intents and purposes was a failure. IIRC, one of the darcs retrospectives I've read, pointed out that GHC runtime behavior and its hard-to-foresee and hard-to-measure complexity properties, was a problem. Moreover, another high-profile failure that springs to mind, is Joel Reymont (wagerlabs.com) trying to write a high-performance poker server in Haskell and eventually abandoning it in disgust due to non-predictable behavior of the GHC runtime. He delivered it (with assorted paeans) in Erlang instead, which proved quite lucrative for him. I used Haskell for 2 years during my undergraduate degree, for program analysis. It was a good choice for such a theoretical domain. Some time later, I had another look at applying it to more practical problems. Besides the slight turn-off due to cultish behavior - which is also obvious in this thread, many posts excuse the lack of documentation or posit it as not a problem (!?), if not outright exalt it! - I got from the community itself, the language felt completely sterile and - most importantly - not fun. The syntax is also atrocious. I concluded that if static typing was needed, I would pick ML every single time over Haskell. I also have no affinity with Haskell's type system (in the sense that it leads to better programs) or its interactive nature (laughable compared to Lisp/Smalltalk). I also remember something Sussman said, "Haskell is the most advanced of the obsolete languages" [1], and can't help but chuckle. [1] https://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-How-To-Compute https://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-How-...

sjakobi 10y ago
> Can you name a single, widely used (outside the Haskell camp) opensource application written in Haskell? How about pandoc, PostgREST, git-annex, the Elm compiler? You can find more examples here: https://github.com/Gabriel439/post-rfc/blob/master/sotu.md https://github.com/Gabriel439/post-rfc/blob/master/sotu.md
- sjakobi 10y ago
  What's the reason for the downvotes?
codygman 10y ago
https://github.com/Microsoft/bond https://github.com/Microsoft/bond
greenrd 10y ago
Darcs was mostly a failure because no-one, not even the original author, could satisfactorily explain its patch model - whereas git's patch model is simple and easy to understand. That has nothing to do with Haskell.
PopsiclePete 10y ago
The only piece of Haskell I rely on is Pandoc. Which is awesome. But I think hardly a shining example of "Look what you can do in Haskell that you can't do in X!"
vanessa98 10y ago
Oh man, please don't ever use Joel Reymont as a language reference - his noisy, uninformed, continuous churn through various programming languages was exhausting back in the day. Just be thankful the hack has gone quiet.