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At nvidia, we have a handful of in-house tools that are written in Haskell. My manager is a huge Haskell fan and he satisfies his coding itch by writing some to

by exDM69 14y ago

At nvidia, we have a handful of in-house tools that are written in Haskell. My manager is a huge Haskell fan and he satisfies his coding itch by writing some tools with it. The tools we have are quite simple, like running a set of automated tests on a Tegra device and then upload results (pass/fail, code coverage, memory leak stats, etc) to a web interface. We've had a few Haskell coding nights where I and my boss have been teaching our teammates some Haskell skills. We have about half a dozen coders (out of ~50 at our office) who can do enough Haskell to get shit done.

apk17 14y ago
That's cool; but what is the point of haskell there? It sounds like you'd just as well could use, say, ruby; what does the specific feature set of haskell help here? (Apart from it being somewhat hard to actually write fortran code in haskell. :-)
- lipponlabang 14y ago
  You could just as easily say what's the point of ruby. Why would they use ruby over haskell? They probable use haskell due to its strong typing and so on.
- djhworld 14y ago
  Type safety would be the main plus point for me, even for tools and scripts. Plus I guess some people just prefer functional programming when they can and Haskell offers that in abundance. I guess the downside is the less portable nature of the code (this is where Clojure et al. would probably win...although writing command line tools and scripts in a JVM language still has a long way to go IMO)
  - exDM69 14y ago
    Actually, Haskell libraries were perhaps more important than any individual language feature. The language allows such good abstractions that libraries like Parsec or Haskell XML toolkit are very nice to use.
- exDM69 14y ago
  It's more fun. There was a freedom of choice and since any language can do the task at hand we chose the one that was interesting and fun and offered us opportunities for learning new stuff. We use Python for small tasks quite a lot too. Python's batteries included approach works pretty well for simple tasks.

by exDM69 14y ago

apk17 14y ago

That's cool; but what is the point of haskell there? It sounds like you'd just as well could use, say, ruby; what does the specific feature set of haskell help here? (Apart from it being somewhat hard to actually write fortran code in haskell. :-)

lipponlabang 14y ago
You could just as easily say what's the point of ruby. Why would they use ruby over haskell? They probable use haskell due to its strong typing and so on.
djhworld 14y ago
Type safety would be the main plus point for me, even for tools and scripts. Plus I guess some people just prefer functional programming when they can and Haskell offers that in abundance. I guess the downside is the less portable nature of the code (this is where Clojure et al. would probably win...although writing command line tools and scripts in a JVM language still has a long way to go IMO)
- exDM69 14y ago
  Actually, Haskell libraries were perhaps more important than any individual language feature. The language allows such good abstractions that libraries like Parsec or Haskell XML toolkit are very nice to use.
exDM69 14y ago
It's more fun. There was a freedom of choice and since any language can do the task at hand we chose the one that was interesting and fun and offered us opportunities for learning new stuff. We use Python for small tasks quite a lot too. Python's batteries included approach works pretty well for simple tasks.