It's not even biased towards Haskell; it's biased towards working at Slamdata, where they abuse free monads for everything.
When you write Javascript and use first class functions (ideally without side-effects, but who the fuck really cares), that's functional programming.
Tired of this elitism.
Some of this stuff is cool and interesting, even to me -- but please don't rank people based on their inferiority of knowledge WRT to you, as you are explicitly doing
> When you write Javascript and use first class functions (ideally without side-effects, but who the fuck really cares), that's functional programming.
Sorry but no. Functional programming requires a whole set of new skills that most programmers don't have.
Learning the basics, pure functions, higher order components, immutability, second order functions, first class functions, lambdas, partial application, currying and point-free style. That's functional programming.
I know I have a long way to go before I'm a competent with functional programming, but I thought I at least understood the basic landscape, even if I don't know how to apply it properly yet.
No one is interested in type-safety or purity for their own sake (except for aesthetic reasons). I'm interested in better, cheaper software. If Haskell's purity (there are simpler languages with similar type systems) provides that then there should be evidence of that before the claim is made. You have not provided any such evidence, and even implied that you're not even carefully collecting metrics that can be used to construct such evidence.
I can assure you our software is not at all simple. Standard Chartered has industry leading portfolio compression and XVA compute. Barclays has industry leading pricing of exotic derivatives (including pricing on GPUs). Both industry leading solutions built in Haskell on top of frameworks/APIs in Haskell.
> No one is interested in type-safety or purity for their own sake (except for aesthetic reasons).
So are all forms of static verification just aesthetics to you? Or just those offered in Haskell?
> I'm interested in better, cheaper software.
Then hire good people and let them use the tools they want.
The only evidence I could ever hope to offer is that good people build good software. But that would never make an interesting management report.
As someone who makes use of formal methods regularly, I am aware of how weak Haskell's static guarantees are. That is not to say they may not be useful in practice, but that's an empirical question, and the one that I'm desperately waiting for answers to.
> The only evidence I could ever hope to offer is that good people build good software. But that would never make an interesting management report.
It also doesn't support the claims made that Haskell makes a significant contribution.
That's excellent. So please publish some numbers so we could estimate the contribution. With so much hype and zero data I think that the skepticism is very well justified.
> The person responsible for our industry leading portfolio compression joined us because we use Haskell.
I have no doubt that some people really like Haskell, but that's not data.
For my own curiosity, to which languages do you allude in this statement?