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I recently went to one of the largest Haskell meetups in Europe and pretty much no one used Haskell any more (including some formerly core people), it was almos

I recently went to one of the largest Haskell meetups in Europe and pretty much no one used Haskell any more (including some formerly core people), it was almost just a social gathering. I think in 2023 many of the things that made Haskell appealing compared to other languages before have been widely adopted, while the developer experience and ecosystem for Haskell is as bad as it was. I wouldn't use it for a new project outside of some specific areas.

Capricorn2481 3y ago
What were some things people were using?
- chpatrick 3y ago
  Rust, TypeScript, C++.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
nh2 3y ago
I went to the same meetup (ZuriHac), and arrived at the opposite conclusion. I gave a lightning talk there on how the Haskell job market has been growing steadily since 2008 [1] [2]. The GHC bug tracker is full of new people filing bugs from production environments. Consultancy blogs such as [3] regularly show industry-sponsored improvements to GHC, which was much more infrequent 10 years ago. A this year's ZuriHac, around 50% of attendees were new to Haskell / had never visited ZuriHac before (this was an audience question). In the past, there were a few well-known companies that used Haskell, in specific niches. Today, the big niches are diminished, and there are more companies that use it in more niches. > the developer experience and ecosystem for Haskell is as bad as it was The developer experience improved significantly over the last years. Today, you can get a good quality IDE environment with VSCode and Haskell-Language-Server that works in both simple and complex environments, and includes all the features you'd expect (completions, immediate type error checking, scoped renames, go-to-definition, find-all-references, call hierarchy, docs-on-hover). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36742311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36742311 [2] https://github.com/nh2/haskell-jobs-statistics https://github.com/nh2/haskell-jobs-statistics [3] https://well-typed.com/blog/ https://well-typed.com/blog/
- chpatrick 3y ago
  Simon Peyton-Jones, the very inventor of the language is now working on Tim Sweeney's Metaverse-themed prolog bullshit. There's no energy left in Haskell. Haskell has fallen between the cracks as neither a super efficient compiled language or a practical interpreted one. It's just a pain in the ass.
  - csb6 3y ago
    SPJ still allocates part of his working time to Haskell [0]. Also he did not invent Haskell. [0] https://discourse.haskell.org/t/an-epic-future-for-spj/3573 https://discourse.haskell.org/t/an-epic-future-for-spj/3573
- chpatrick 3y ago
  > The developer experience improved significantly over the last years. > Today, you can get a good quality IDE environment with VSCode and Haskell-Language-Server that works in both simple and complex environments, and includes all the features you'd expect (completions, immediate type error checking, scoped renames, go-to-definition, find-all-references, call hierarchy, docs-on-hover). In 2023 Haskell has indeed kind of reached 2003 levels of IDE support but you can forget about a working debugger, practical compile times or you know, stack traces.

Capricorn2481 3y ago

What were some things people were using?

chpatrick 3y ago
Rust, TypeScript, C++.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

nh2 3y ago

I went to the same meetup (ZuriHac), and arrived at the opposite conclusion. I gave a lightning talk there on how the Haskell job market has been growing steadily since 2008 [1] [2]. The GHC bug tracker is full of new people filing bugs from production environments. Consultancy blogs such as [3] regularly show industry-sponsored improvements to GHC, which was much more infrequent 10 years ago. A this year's ZuriHac, around 50% of attendees were new to Haskell / had never visited ZuriHac before (this was an audience question). In the past, there were a few well-known companies that used Haskell, in specific niches. Today, the big niches are diminished, and there are more companies that use it in more niches. > the developer experience and ecosystem for Haskell is as bad as it was The developer experience improved significantly over the last years. Today, you can get a good quality IDE environment with VSCode and Haskell-Language-Server that works in both simple and complex environments, and includes all the features you'd expect (completions, immediate type error checking, scoped renames, go-to-definition, find-all-references, call hierarchy, docs-on-hover). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36742311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36742311 [2] https://github.com/nh2/haskell-jobs-statistics https://github.com/nh2/haskell-jobs-statistics [3] https://well-typed.com/blog/ https://well-typed.com/blog/

chpatrick 3y ago
Simon Peyton-Jones, the very inventor of the language is now working on Tim Sweeney's Metaverse-themed prolog bullshit. There's no energy left in Haskell. Haskell has fallen between the cracks as neither a super efficient compiled language or a practical interpreted one. It's just a pain in the ass.
- csb6 3y ago
  SPJ still allocates part of his working time to Haskell [0]. Also he did not invent Haskell. [0] https://discourse.haskell.org/t/an-epic-future-for-spj/3573 https://discourse.haskell.org/t/an-epic-future-for-spj/3573
chpatrick 3y ago
> The developer experience improved significantly over the last years. > Today, you can get a good quality IDE environment with VSCode and Haskell-Language-Server that works in both simple and complex environments, and includes all the features you'd expect (completions, immediate type error checking, scoped renames, go-to-definition, find-all-references, call hierarchy, docs-on-hover). In 2023 Haskell has indeed kind of reached 2003 levels of IDE support but you can forget about a working debugger, practical compile times or you know, stack traces.