4 ms·

> Some companies are using haskell for non trivial needs, they just dont talk much about it. Sorry but doesn't this statement fit better to the definition of "

> Some companies are using haskell for non trivial needs, they just dont talk much about it. Sorry but doesn't this statement fit better to the definition of "borderline" something?

agumonkey 7y ago
Apologies if my comment felt offending. I've just seen a few stories about companies using non mainstream tools for important matter without making a product out of it. Caring only about known programs made in <lang> is shallow IMO
- pron 7y ago
  If a language is used at a company and its use is not spreading rapidly within that company (as has happened with Fortran and C and Java/Python) you do ask yourself, is the language actually serving a business purpose, or is the business serving a "language purpose" by giving some fans their entertainment? I can't think of a worse signal for a language's value, or perhaps the size of its useful domain, than it being used for years at a company without spreading.
  - agumonkey 7y ago
    Mild point, there's no way a single language would suddenly progress through all layers no matter what its qualities. I understand your question though, it's highly possible that the devs picked haskell for their own interest. But so far it's been a few years and the haskell "module" is dealing with the core of their business.
    - pron 7y ago
      > there's no way a single language would suddenly progress through all layers no matter what its qualities. Except that's exactly what languages that provide a business value do (like the ones I mentioned). Maybe not always in all layers, but they tend to fill a big, wide niche at a company very quickly.
- patrec 7y ago
  Well, to my mind the fact that Haskell has a large amount of mind share in academia and smart programmers, has been around for decades and there is very little to show for it[*] that I'm aware off makes me think it almost certainly has negative average utility for developing useful software. Why would you think otherwise? I'm not saying it will necessarily have negative utility for your particular problem, or that the negative utility it has might not be a cost worth swallowing in order to hire some really smart programmers who happen to like it.
  - agumonkey 7y ago
    You could argue the opposite too. How many pure fp things from academia managed to even survive out of the publication phase ? I'm not that pro-haskell but I also see how all languages in the last decade shifted toward fp idioms clearly. I mean redux is a fold.
    - patrec 7y ago
      I don't understand your argument, in that I really can't see how one can equally argue the opposite. I fully acknowledge that Haskell has been successful as a test bed for PL research, and I also think Haskell is an interesting language worth studying. It is also true that FP ideas have increasingly bled into mainstream languages over the past two decades. But that does in no way imply that Haskell is in any way a good general choice for writing useful software. And although a lot of practically useful stuff has come out of Haskell-land (property based testing, for example), it's not even obvious to me that Haskell has been a huge part of the shift to more FP-y idioms (compared, to say, scheme or SML). Your own example, fold, has been around decades before Haskell.
      - agumonkey 7y ago
        What can I say, I didn't read why es6, php or cpp lifted closures into the language. I consider this is pure FP influence which haskell is the most known instance. And yeah scheme and sml were prior art, but sml is not even on the map of PL choices (I saw it mentionned in rust history, but I think it's mostly the eager semantics, otherwise you could replace it with any pure FP language)

> Some companies are using haskell for non trivial needs, they just dont talk much about it. Sorry but doesn't this statement fit better to the definition of "borderline" something?

agumonkey 7y ago

Apologies if my comment felt offending. I've just seen a few stories about companies using non mainstream tools for important matter without making a product out of it. Caring only about known programs made in <lang> is shallow IMO

pron 7y ago
If a language is used at a company and its use is not spreading rapidly within that company (as has happened with Fortran and C and Java/Python) you do ask yourself, is the language actually serving a business purpose, or is the business serving a "language purpose" by giving some fans their entertainment? I can't think of a worse signal for a language's value, or perhaps the size of its useful domain, than it being used for years at a company without spreading.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  Mild point, there's no way a single language would suddenly progress through all layers no matter what its qualities. I understand your question though, it's highly possible that the devs picked haskell for their own interest. But so far it's been a few years and the haskell "module" is dealing with the core of their business.
  - pron 7y ago
    > there's no way a single language would suddenly progress through all layers no matter what its qualities. Except that's exactly what languages that provide a business value do (like the ones I mentioned). Maybe not always in all layers, but they tend to fill a big, wide niche at a company very quickly.
patrec 7y ago
Well, to my mind the fact that Haskell has a large amount of mind share in academia and smart programmers, has been around for decades and there is very little to show for it[*] that I'm aware off makes me think it almost certainly has negative average utility for developing useful software. Why would you think otherwise? I'm not saying it will necessarily have negative utility for your particular problem, or that the negative utility it has might not be a cost worth swallowing in order to hire some really smart programmers who happen to like it.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  You could argue the opposite too. How many pure fp things from academia managed to even survive out of the publication phase ? I'm not that pro-haskell but I also see how all languages in the last decade shifted toward fp idioms clearly. I mean redux is a fold.
  - patrec 7y ago
    I don't understand your argument, in that I really can't see how one can equally argue the opposite. I fully acknowledge that Haskell has been successful as a test bed for PL research, and I also think Haskell is an interesting language worth studying. It is also true that FP ideas have increasingly bled into mainstream languages over the past two decades. But that does in no way imply that Haskell is in any way a good general choice for writing useful software. And although a lot of practically useful stuff has come out of Haskell-land (property based testing, for example), it's not even obvious to me that Haskell has been a huge part of the shift to more FP-y idioms (compared, to say, scheme or SML). Your own example, fold, has been around decades before Haskell.
    - agumonkey 7y ago
      What can I say, I didn't read why es6, php or cpp lifted closures into the language. I consider this is pure FP influence which haskell is the most known instance. And yeah scheme and sml were prior art, but sml is not even on the map of PL choices (I saw it mentionned in rust history, but I think it's mostly the eager semantics, otherwise you could replace it with any pure FP language)