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I'm not sure where this idea that it is "mostly used for sudoku solvers" comes from. While clearly insulting, it is also clearly false. The breadth of code on

by dons 18y ago

I'm not sure where this idea that it is "mostly used for sudoku solvers" comes from. While clearly insulting, it is also clearly false. The breadth of code on http://hackage.haskell.org/ http://hackage.haskell.org/ gives witness to this, with just on 1000 libraries written over the last 18 months, most heavily weighted towards networking, graphics, guis, databases, and so on. Similarly, the industrial users , http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_industry http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_industry , aren't writing sudoku solvers, but are finance houses, defense contractors, game companies, bioinformatics places, hardware dessign, a full range of applications, for a general purpose language.

davidw 18y ago
Some of those are pretty big companies - clearly they're not using it for everything, but have decided it's the best choice for some particular problem domain. Sure, it's a general purpose language, but where's the "sweet spot"? I could write scientific number crunching stuff in Ruby, but that's definitely not its forte.
- dons 18y ago
  Problems where robustness or correctness matters, I'd say.
rkts 18y ago
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that Haskell is only used for writing toy programs. I meant that Haskell people gravitate toward problems that are functional in nature. Many such programs are useful, though rarely in isolation. If you're wondering where the idea comes from, here's an example. There is a thread on Facebook titled "What have you made using Haskell?" http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=2213713570&topic=2811 http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=2213713570&topic=2... Here are the responses: 1. HAppS (a web thingy) 2. A minesweeper clone 3. A preprocessor for POV-Ray source files 4. A program to prove graph isomorphisms 5. A parser for boolean logic sentences 6. A lambda expression evaluator with alpha equivalence testing 7. A hyperbolic raytracer 8. An image regression program 9. A program that finds equidistant letter sequences 10. A boolean expression to truth table converter 11. A resolution theorem prover 12. An interpreter of a Prolog basic subset 13. A Markov Chain generator 14. An anagram generator 15. A library for doing computation inside various algebraic structures 16. A maze generator and solver Some of these are exercises, some are toys, some look potentially useful. But except for the first two, they are all pure-functional problems, and are rather abstract. Maybe this sample isn't representative of all Haskell usage or what Haskell is capable of, but the stereotype, like most stereotypes, exists for a reason.
- dons 18y ago
  I wouldn't imagine facebook is a representative sample of the serious developer community...

by dons 18y ago

davidw 18y ago

Some of those are pretty big companies - clearly they're not using it for everything, but have decided it's the best choice for some particular problem domain. Sure, it's a general purpose language, but where's the "sweet spot"? I could write scientific number crunching stuff in Ruby, but that's definitely not its forte.

dons 18y ago
Problems where robustness or correctness matters, I'd say.

rkts 18y ago

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that Haskell is only used for writing toy programs. I meant that Haskell people gravitate toward problems that are functional in nature. Many such programs are useful, though rarely in isolation. If you're wondering where the idea comes from, here's an example. There is a thread on Facebook titled "What have you made using Haskell?" http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=2213713570&topic=2811 http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=2213713570&topic=2... Here are the responses: 1. HAppS (a web thingy) 2. A minesweeper clone 3. A preprocessor for POV-Ray source files 4. A program to prove graph isomorphisms 5. A parser for boolean logic sentences 6. A lambda expression evaluator with alpha equivalence testing 7. A hyperbolic raytracer 8. An image regression program 9. A program that finds equidistant letter sequences 10. A boolean expression to truth table converter 11. A resolution theorem prover 12. An interpreter of a Prolog basic subset 13. A Markov Chain generator 14. An anagram generator 15. A library for doing computation inside various algebraic structures 16. A maze generator and solver Some of these are exercises, some are toys, some look potentially useful. But except for the first two, they are all pure-functional problems, and are rather abstract. Maybe this sample isn't representative of all Haskell usage or what Haskell is capable of, but the stereotype, like most stereotypes, exists for a reason.

dons 18y ago
I wouldn't imagine facebook is a representative sample of the serious developer community...