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Comment by jtmarmon | Hacker News Reader

haskell on rails. the amazing static typing, binary compilation, etc of haskell, with a large ecosystem and monolith framework (like rails) behind it. haskell's community's focus on challenging, technical, scientific or mathematical problems has left normal web developers plainly not using it. but as our rails codebase has grown, it's hard to identify refactoring issues outside of obessive and overlapping unit tests.

i think Java actually comes closest to what I want here but unfortunately it's pretty hard to get past all the cruft the ecosystem has accrued over the years, plus it's java and marketing that as a company/developer sucks. also java is missing some expressiveness of haskells TS

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I'm with you.

Haskell's Yesod framework is pretty feature competitive with rails/django, but it doesn't have 1/10th of the community.

I'd love to see Haskell gain wide popularity, but I don't think it's realistically going to happen. People generally travel the path of least resistance, and learning Haskell requires a lot of time and effort before you can be competitively productive with it. Individuals will choose to make that investment, but the masses won't unless they are forced.

I think the closest thing to what we want right now is node with typescript.

I agree with you both that it would be amazing to see this in Haskell, and that Java (which I'm using full time now, after years of rails) is close-ish to what you want. I think this is what Scala is supposed to be, but I'm not sure it has realized that potential. You should look into Kotlin - you'll still miss Haskell's type system, but it's a good bit nicer than Java, and has a lot less history.

so what's `django` for java ?

Sorry, I really don't know, I'm not working at that sort of level at the moment.

did you switch to java for work reasons or because you wanted to?

For work reasons, but I was very happy to do it. Java would not have been my first choice, but I would have preferred it to another project using Rails, if those were the only options.

Yesod(http://www.yesodweb.com/) may be the web framework of your dreams. Yesod is great for building web apps and APIs. The biggest downside is the long compile time which leads to issues with cheap VPS instances since you need to compile on another machine since the instance doesn't have enough RAM.

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