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Does Haskell offer any tangible, practical advantages or benefits over other languages in the context of a web framework, aside from just "if you prefer a funct

Does Haskell offer any tangible, practical advantages or benefits over other languages in the context of a web framework, aside from just "if you prefer a functional style of programming and you're working on a web project, here's a way to do it"? I'd love for somebody to convince me why a Haskell approach to web frameworks is superior to Python/PHP/Ruby/JS beyond the usual "it's a matter of taste" argument.

jamwt 15y ago
Haskell's advantages (and disadvantages) as a Web Framework are generally the same as in any other application domain: performance, concurrency, and correctness.
- zura 15y ago
  While I agree regarding correctness and concurrency, I wouldn't emphasize performance, even for Java and .NET, whose GCs are more developed, tuned and tested in the production environment than Haskell's one. Edit: And for Haskell, achieving needed performance can be quite tricky with regard to its laziness.
  - jamesbritt 15y ago
    There was some discussion on HN about the Snap Web framework benchmarks relative to some other frameworks: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1380405 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1380405 No .Net in there, though.
  - danieldk 15y ago
    Edit: And for Haskell, achieving needed performance can be quite tricky with regard to its laziness. But Snap is driven by enumerators/iteratees (via the enumerator package), which make it much easier to do fast near-constant space IO. I have built a web application that uses Snap to query large (parse) treebanks, and it was easy to make it performant.
supersillyus 15y ago
For one, GHC gives you M:N threads with the runtime handling the async IO under the hood, making it possible to write code in a simple blocking style while still getting use of all your cores and having fast IO. This is also true for Erlang, Go, and a few others, though, and it's not terribly relevant for lots of simple web code, but it is a practical advantage.
jerf 15y ago
"Does Haskell offer any tangible, practical advantages or benefits over other languages in the context of a web framework, aside from just "if you prefer a functional style of programming and you're working on a web project, here's a way to do it"?" At the moment, my answer is "Not yet, but ask again in a year." There are tons of interesting things happening in the area of letting you have "performance, correctness, rapid development and prototyping, pick three", but they're still in the early phases yet.

jamwt 15y ago

Haskell's advantages (and disadvantages) as a Web Framework are generally the same as in any other application domain: performance, concurrency, and correctness.

zura 15y ago
While I agree regarding correctness and concurrency, I wouldn't emphasize performance, even for Java and .NET, whose GCs are more developed, tuned and tested in the production environment than Haskell's one. Edit: And for Haskell, achieving needed performance can be quite tricky with regard to its laziness.
- jamesbritt 15y ago
  There was some discussion on HN about the Snap Web framework benchmarks relative to some other frameworks: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1380405 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1380405 No .Net in there, though.
- danieldk 15y ago
  Edit: And for Haskell, achieving needed performance can be quite tricky with regard to its laziness. But Snap is driven by enumerators/iteratees (via the enumerator package), which make it much easier to do fast near-constant space IO. I have built a web application that uses Snap to query large (parse) treebanks, and it was easy to make it performant.

supersillyus 15y ago

For one, GHC gives you M:N threads with the runtime handling the async IO under the hood, making it possible to write code in a simple blocking style while still getting use of all your cores and having fast IO. This is also true for Erlang, Go, and a few others, though, and it's not terribly relevant for lots of simple web code, but it is a practical advantage.

jerf 15y ago

"Does Haskell offer any tangible, practical advantages or benefits over other languages in the context of a web framework, aside from just "if you prefer a functional style of programming and you're working on a web project, here's a way to do it"?" At the moment, my answer is "Not yet, but ask again in a year." There are tons of interesting things happening in the area of letting you have "performance, correctness, rapid development and prototyping, pick three", but they're still in the early phases yet.