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I do see fundamental reasons. Haskell was designed from conception to be a platform for research and education. I’d say it was a wild success at those two thing

I do see fundamental reasons. Haskell was designed from conception to be a platform for research and education. I’d say it was a wild success at those two things. Certain decisions that made it successful as a platform for research and education make it less suitable for use writing applications in industry. The main decision I am thinking about is lazy evaluation. Lazy evaluation forces authors to write pure code, which drove Haskell’s community to build libraries that expressed effects in the type system, which made things like STM possible. If I wanted to design a Haskell-like for industry use, I would give it non-lazy evaluation (I’m not gonna say “strict” because I think the compiler should be free to omit the evaluation of any expression, but it sure would be convenient if we had more predictable performance characteristics). I’m also not saying that you can’t use Haskell in industry. Obviously, people do that.

thedataangel 4y ago
Having used Haskell in industry, I can say it's actually _surprisingly_ good at boring run-of-the-mill software. The strong focus on correctness and the ecosystem-wide consistency of it's core design patterns means you spend a lot less time debugging things, and a lot more time writing the thing you actually want to write. That said, the type system _does_ stand in the way of learning it - though it's very powerful once you get your head around it - and lazy evaluation means you do spend more time than you'd generally like hunting down space leaks if you're writing the sort of code that's capable of getting space leaks.
- baq 4y ago
  ...which is as easy as using foldl instead of foldl' instead of foldr, which to a beginner is... mildly confusing.
mark_l_watson 4y ago
OCaml uses eager, not lazy evaluation but it is even less popular than Haskell. BTW, I like Haskell, but I feel like a novice, still learning, even though I wrote a Haskell book (you can read it online for free https://leanpub.com/haskell-cookbook/read https://leanpub.com/haskell-cookbook/read).

thedataangel 4y ago

Having used Haskell in industry, I can say it's actually _surprisingly_ good at boring run-of-the-mill software. The strong focus on correctness and the ecosystem-wide consistency of it's core design patterns means you spend a lot less time debugging things, and a lot more time writing the thing you actually want to write. That said, the type system _does_ stand in the way of learning it - though it's very powerful once you get your head around it - and lazy evaluation means you do spend more time than you'd generally like hunting down space leaks if you're writing the sort of code that's capable of getting space leaks.

baq 4y ago
...which is as easy as using foldl instead of foldl' instead of foldr, which to a beginner is... mildly confusing.

mark_l_watson 4y ago

OCaml uses eager, not lazy evaluation but it is even less popular than Haskell. BTW, I like Haskell, but I feel like a novice, still learning, even though I wrote a Haskell book (you can read it online for free https://leanpub.com/haskell-cookbook/read https://leanpub.com/haskell-cookbook/read).