5 ms·
Okay, so this is admittedly snarky but we've seen this sort of blog post so much that it has practically become an Onion article: Why Haskell Is Our Secret Weap
by darksaints 6y ago
Okay, so this is admittedly snarky but we've seen this sort of blog post so much that it has practically become an Onion article: Why Haskell Is Our Secret Weapon, by Startup You've Never Heard Of.
And then when someone points out that nobody knows who they are or what they've built, we get commenters talking about how company X, Y, and Z are also using Haskell. And those claims also come up short...most of them can't say where or how it is being used because they don't know...just that at some point in the past, someone emails were exchanged between someone@bignamecompany.com and someone@haskell.org, and now there is a piece of copy on the Haskell website that disingenuously claims BigNameCompany is powered by Haskell!. Who cares how pervasivly it is used...if someone writes a config parser with Haskell, all of a sudden we can claim that BigNameCompany would fall over on its face if Haskell wasn't there protecting it.
Come on. Nobody cares that Haskell is your secret weapon if you've never overcome an opponent with it. Or built an entire profitable company on its back. All these types of posts do is fake an authority so you can jump straight to your fallacious argument by authority.
If you want to argue the merits of your favorite language, then do it. Don't make us sit through an argument about how your language makes you special when you aren't even noteworthy enough for a 10 sentence Wikipedia blurb. There are a lot of valid and powerful technical arguments in this article, but they're ruined by framing them all around the premise that we care about how it makes you and your startup special.
- andai 6y agoI don't think the article warrants such a harsh reaction. Was it the word "our" in the title? They're just writing from their perspective.
- warcher 6y agoI'm not really a haskell fan, but the lion's share of that effect more that likely comes from the small sample size of companies using haskell. Even if it were somehow superior, there just are enough people trying it to be coming up with a unicorn startup or two. Now, the lack of skilled haskell programmers on the other hand, that's a pretty scary proposition if you're starting a company and may find yourself riding on a rocket, needing as many able hands as you can possibly find.
- throwaway894345 6y agoAt least they don't have exactly one company that has had some decent success with The Language in production, and were it not for the evangelism of The Language Community, you wouldn't know who the company was. And if you ask, "how does one do multithreading in The Language?", The Community will shout at you about how you don't really need multithreading and The Company has been super successful and never once needed multithreading and by the way multithreading will be a feature in The Language Very Soon. :)
- jimbokun 6y ago> Okay, so this is admittedly snarky but we've seen this sort of blog post so much that it has practically become an Onion article: Why Haskell Is Our Secret Weapon, by Startup You've Never Heard Of. But occasionally it pays off in a really big way. Like WhatsApp cashing out for $19 billion, on a product they never could have scaled with so few engineers without Erlang. Like Viaweb and Common Lisp, where Paul Graham says the language allowed them to move much faster than their competitors. One anecdote was about talking on the phone to a customer reporting a bug, and actually fixing it on the live system and asking the customer to try again, and the customer was shocked to find it now worked. Like ITA, who created the best in class flight search system in Lisp and then sold to Google. Every once in a while, an unpopular but powerful technology really is the secret sauce for a winning product.
- yen223 6y agoWhatsApp was sold to a company that made even more money off the back of a PHP stack.