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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
by 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 agoWhat's the reason for the downvotes?
- codygman 10y agohttps://github.com/Microsoft/bond https://github.com/Microsoft/bond
- greenrd 10y agoDarcs 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 agoThe 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 agoOh 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.