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> Yet another confirmation that pure functional langs work great when its just one or two buddies working on a "pure programming" project, but evidence remains

> Yet another confirmation that pure functional langs work great when its just one or two buddies working on a "pure programming" project, but evidence remains scant of their utility beyond that. Evidence is abundant if you look for it. FB, Microsoft, and Standard Chartered all have active internal haskell projects.

pphysch 5y ago
Do any of these projects have more than 1-2 active maintainers?
- bidirectional 5y ago
  None of them are individual projects, all of those companies have several projects in Haskell. Standard Chartered, for one, have their own custom implementation of Haskell and it is used by dozens of developers across different projects.
  - dllthomas 5y ago
    IIUC it's their own custom implementation of something a lot like Haskell, with the compiler implemented in Haskell.
    - samhh 5y ago
      It's called Mu. It's strict and has a few other quirks. There are a few different teams using it for different projects. Source: Used to work there.
taeric 5y ago
Like all evidence, it is actually easy to find both sides. Notably, I have yet to come across a project in clojure, Haskel, or scala that wasn't abandoned as soon as the major advocate for that language left the group. Sad in the cases where it was a well done project. Frustrating when it was bursting at the seams.
- whateveracct 5y ago
  The main reason for that phenomenon is it's more personally advantageous to rewrite than to learn Haskell and extend what's there. Haskell advocate quits? Blame them for selfishly using a toy language (they're gone anyways - who is gonna disagree?), and save the day by spending a long time reimplementing an MVP subset of what they already did. Congrats - you're a hero! The end product has less functionality, but at least you didn't have to do something actually hard like learn Haskell and work with Someone Else's Code. I've seen this happen multiple times. For shame - and yes people did get promotions for it. Pathetic.
  - taeric 5y ago
    That would be the sad case. I have also seen the case where the code was impenetrable and did not at all lend itself to extension.
    - whateveracct 5y ago
      I've worked on a Haskell project supposedly like that. Took me a couple weeks of not complaining to improve it significantly. The trick was not closing my eyes at the sight of ugly bad code.
      - taeric 5y ago
        My problem with this, is you can replace "Haskell" with any other language in that sentence, and it still works.
        whateveracct 5y ago
        Why's that a problem? It is true if any language. But people act like Haskell can create a mess that is beyond what other languages can create. To the point where it isn't true that you can just..fix it by not complaining.
        5y ago
hota_mazi 5y ago
I've always been fascinated by the fact that these claims are always completely unfalsifiable. "A lot of companies use this <non mainstream language> in internal projects but since it's internal, we can't show you". It reminds me of "I have a girlfriend but she goes to another school".
- mjh2539 5y ago
  https://engineering.fb.com/2015/06/26/security/fighting-spam-with-haskell/ https://engineering.fb.com/2015/06/26/security/fighting-spam... https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/phooqo/haskell_roles_in_warsaw_shanghai_or_london_with/ https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/phooqo/haskell_rol... https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/oee437/job_ad_senior_haskell_dev_in_london_with_standard/ https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/oee437/job_ad_seni... https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/nug8mw/haskell_job_in_sg_or_hk_with_standard_chartered/ https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/nug8mw/haskell_job... https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/nn11sm/haskell_job_in_the_uk_with_standard_chartered/ https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/nn11sm/haskell_job... https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/n642ve/haskell_developer_position_at_standard_chartered/ https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/n642ve/haskell_dev... https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/8io3uk/job_work_on_ghc_at_facebook_london/ https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/8io3uk/job_work_on...
  - hota_mazi 5y ago
    So... an article from six years ago, and then a few open job reqs.
  - twic 5y ago
    I've spoken to people who have been through that department at Facebook, and they report the scale of use of Haskell is wildly exaggerated.
- bojo 5y ago
  I mean, what are those of us in this category supposed to do? For the last 5 years I have 7 developers that have been working on internal applications in Haskell for an enterprise company that I am not able to show you due to legal reasons. We have a small open source library or two out there, but they are not even remotely representative of how deep our development iceberg really is.

pphysch 5y ago

Do any of these projects have more than 1-2 active maintainers?

bidirectional 5y ago
None of them are individual projects, all of those companies have several projects in Haskell. Standard Chartered, for one, have their own custom implementation of Haskell and it is used by dozens of developers across different projects.
- dllthomas 5y ago
  IIUC it's their own custom implementation of something a lot like Haskell, with the compiler implemented in Haskell.
  - samhh 5y ago
    It's called Mu. It's strict and has a few other quirks. There are a few different teams using it for different projects. Source: Used to work there.

taeric 5y ago

Like all evidence, it is actually easy to find both sides. Notably, I have yet to come across a project in clojure, Haskel, or scala that wasn't abandoned as soon as the major advocate for that language left the group. Sad in the cases where it was a well done project. Frustrating when it was bursting at the seams.

whateveracct 5y ago
The main reason for that phenomenon is it's more personally advantageous to rewrite than to learn Haskell and extend what's there. Haskell advocate quits? Blame them for selfishly using a toy language (they're gone anyways - who is gonna disagree?), and save the day by spending a long time reimplementing an MVP subset of what they already did. Congrats - you're a hero! The end product has less functionality, but at least you didn't have to do something actually hard like learn Haskell and work with Someone Else's Code. I've seen this happen multiple times. For shame - and yes people did get promotions for it. Pathetic.
- taeric 5y ago
  That would be the sad case. I have also seen the case where the code was impenetrable and did not at all lend itself to extension.
  - whateveracct 5y ago
    I've worked on a Haskell project supposedly like that. Took me a couple weeks of not complaining to improve it significantly. The trick was not closing my eyes at the sight of ugly bad code.
    - taeric 5y ago
      My problem with this, is you can replace "Haskell" with any other language in that sentence, and it still works.
      - whateveracct 5y ago
        Why's that a problem? It is true if any language. But people act like Haskell can create a mess that is beyond what other languages can create. To the point where it isn't true that you can just..fix it by not complaining.
        5y ago

hota_mazi 5y ago

I've always been fascinated by the fact that these claims are always completely unfalsifiable. "A lot of companies use this <non mainstream language> in internal projects but since it's internal, we can't show you". It reminds me of "I have a girlfriend but she goes to another school".

mjh2539 5y ago
https://engineering.fb.com/2015/06/26/security/fighting-spam-with-haskell/ https://engineering.fb.com/2015/06/26/security/fighting-spam... https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/phooqo/haskell_roles_in_warsaw_shanghai_or_london_with/ https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/phooqo/haskell_rol... https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/oee437/job_ad_senior_haskell_dev_in_london_with_standard/ https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/oee437/job_ad_seni... https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/nug8mw/haskell_job_in_sg_or_hk_with_standard_chartered/ https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/nug8mw/haskell_job... https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/nn11sm/haskell_job_in_the_uk_with_standard_chartered/ https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/nn11sm/haskell_job... https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/n642ve/haskell_developer_position_at_standard_chartered/ https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/n642ve/haskell_dev... https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/8io3uk/job_work_on_ghc_at_facebook_london/ https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/8io3uk/job_work_on...
- hota_mazi 5y ago
  So... an article from six years ago, and then a few open job reqs.
- twic 5y ago
  I've spoken to people who have been through that department at Facebook, and they report the scale of use of Haskell is wildly exaggerated.
bojo 5y ago
I mean, what are those of us in this category supposed to do? For the last 5 years I have 7 developers that have been working on internal applications in Haskell for an enterprise company that I am not able to show you due to legal reasons. We have a small open source library or two out there, but they are not even remotely representative of how deep our development iceberg really is.