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Comment by choeger | Hacker News Reader

> It did drain out confidence and make us think, we are not so clever.

I don't want to sound arrogant, but maybe that is the truth right here? Maybe what you struggled with was not what you should have actually done the way you did?

I see everyday that "quick" solutions in Python are woefully incomplete and tend to just ignore the complicated corner cases. You don't get away with that in Haskell in my experience. So maybe you just underestimated your problem domain?

I understand that the ecosystem of Haskell is much smaller than for instance python, but an experienced programmer should recognize that. So if your team struggled it could indicate that your initial specification was just too shallow?

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No you don't sound arrogant, our team is still learning. You are right we shouldn't have approached the way we did due to inexperience.

My team only did C, C++ and bit of Java in University and majority of the things they learned were more object oriented and procedural programming.

As none of them were trained in haskell, it took them a while to get to do anything. Moreover we were just working on web application bakcend, so they felt instantly productive in Python. We were not cracking compiler or some hard computer science problem, we were just doing run of the mill web application like Amazon marketplace.

So I said may be in future may try Haskell. Right now on a personal level trying lisp.

> No you don't sound arrogant, our team is still learning. ... So I said may be in future may try Haskell.

I'm conflicted as to whether functional programming like Haskell a right business solution to real-world problems. Businesses need to hire developers, and almost all of them taught procedural programming in school.

Is functional programming innately more intellectual / hard to grasp than procedural programming? Or is it just not taught enough in school? I'm not really sure.

Procedural programming more closely matches the real world with one thing happening after the next. Functional programming more closely matches math with one thing represented as a transformation of another. To me, one does not seem any more difficult than another, but clearly, many more devs understand procedural programming better than functional.

In a real-world business, you need to hire developers with the skills they have. Junior devs are far more comfortable in procedural programming than functional programming. Most businesses can't afford a team of senior devs. So regardless of whether one is easier/harder/better/etc., we get procedural programming, not functional.

It's worth bearing in mind that when writing something side effecting (reading and writing to a database for example) in Haskell, it will be done imperatively.

There's definitely a bias towards the familiar however, it took me a while to get my head around the "FP way" as it were. The frustrating thing is that like you say most people are just trained in procedural programming with often at most minimal contact with anything functional which causes a kind of pressure on the whole industry.

Sure, if you never had any exposure to Haskell, you should probably not start your business with it ;). I wonder though, did the team know what to do and struggled only with the how or did they also struggle with the what and shadowed this problem by doing something (a.k.a. "agile development" ;) )

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