5/21/2023 0 Comments Haskell languageSomeone wrote to me: “One of the defining features of both Haskell itself and its community is that they didn’t try to achieve any kind of mainstream recognition. If the topic is ever brought up, it’s only talked about in full depth and as objectively as possible. Haskell doesn’t lend itself to popular explanation, and people seemingly don’t even try. I was quite afraid at first, and, as it turned out, I was right. To get to know Haskell programmers better, I came to a topical Telegram chat with some questions. Until then, all I heard about Haskell could be summarized as “be VERY careful in dealing with it”. And even though the answer was rather polite and well-supported with arguments, it still sounded like “Come on, don’t even bring up these toys”. I carefully asked if they considered using something more popular and new. Which was part of the reason he came to Moscow. The work stack included Haskell and C++, among others, and the founder was complaining about how hard it is to find competent programmers. If you would like to read more about Haskell High Performance Programming, have a look at the book that I wrote about the subject.I once had a discussion with a founder of an Israeli startup developing a GPU-based database with a focus on speed. It’s great to see that the interest in less used languages is growing and will hopefully also continue to grow in the years to come! We recently hosted a Haskell & Elm meetup at RELEX headquarters in Helsinki and ended up having a full house of enthusiastic developers join the meetup. This has paved the way for also other less common languages, such as Elm, Kotlin and Clojure, to be used in projects. In a new project, tech stack is almost always decided by the team working on that project. Thus, developers get to influence which technologies are used and when. It’s not easy to learn new concepts while also unlearning old habits.Īt RELEX it is believed that best decisions are made by those who are experts in that area, regardless of their title or position. The only reason Haskell and its relatives are not more widely adopted is that CS educations around the world barely even mention these languages. One could argue, though, that the steepness of that curve is almost entirely artificial. There’s no denying that Haskell has a steep learning curve for most people. And then there’s the psychological fright in needing to learn about monads in order to write a Hello World program. Of course, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch: debugging performance issues can be tricky due to lazy evaluation and aggressive compile-time program transformations. Most importantly, it’s a very pleasant language to work with! Strong, healthy and very supportive community.Concurrency is easy compared to many other languages.An advanced system, which provides a lot of extra safety and flexibility.Concise, high-level, practical and also very fast.Although it’s not as popular as Python/Java/C++, Haskell has many benefits compared to them: Today, Haskell is widely used in the software industry. New features and improvements are implemented constantly by a team of Haskellers that has grown ever since. The experience has been extremely positive: a team of only a few people used Haskell to build useful, reliable and maintainable software that many rely on daily to get things done. Since 2016, RELEX has had Haskell (and some Elm) deployed in production.
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