Comment by _slyo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _slyo | Hacker News Reader

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Software engineering is all about trade-offs and making sure stakeholders are fully informed thereof. Pressure to deliver is one of the most challenging problems an engineer can face, because it stands in opposition to every ideal. Yet it's about as normal as death and taxes.

Haskell sounds amazing. I would be thrilled to learn it, and I hope the ecosystem flourishes. I hope there will eventually be millions of jobs to write code in the language. I'm a little bit envious of those who speak fluently about monads and set theory, and I've learned a lot from brushing shoulders with those people.

Meanwhile, I'll continue solving real-world, extremely stateful problems in an as-purely-functional-as-I-deem-convenient manner with the tools I already have under my belt. You can pry my precious semicolons from my cold, dead, carpal-tunnelled hands.

Haskell is useful whatever your priorities are (unless you have a really low quality requirement, like a script that fits on a single page and gets run only once). If you think of the project management triangle, switching to Haskell gets you a bonus that you can distribute between the points as you wish: you can produce higher-quality code for the same scope/cost/time, wider-scoped code at the same quality/cost/time, code at the same quality/scope/cost in less time, or so on.

IME a lot of Haskell advocates spend this windfall in a way that's poorly aligned to business requirements: we spend it all on increasing the code quality (and perhaps even overshoot, taking more time than users of another language to produce code of the same scope). But that's not an inevitability. (I would speculate that it tends to happen because most people in the software industry claim to value quality a lot more than they actually do, and a lot of Haskell programmers take them at their word).

Hi. I run three startups on Haskell.

One of them is VC funded. We have the stakeholders. We have the pressure to deliver.

Haskell is making this easier, not harder. We can maintain pace as the software grows because the language is generally well-principled, and the compiler keeps us in check rather than us having to rely on human discipline.

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