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Comment by Mathnerd314 | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't particularly look like it's having a moment: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore/TIMESERIES/15723666...

Both Haskell and Prolog seem to run on a school-year cycle where search interest peaks a little before the end of the semester. Prolog's cycle is significantly more pronounced, suggesting the interest is indeed purely academic. Whereas Rust has been growing steadily and shows little seasonality.

I'd say it's random chance, given X million programmers and Y million articles there's always somebody who will see a lot of Z topic.

Terminus in particular seems to be an extension of work Gavin did during his postdoc, in particular the Dacura stuff mentioned here: http://aligned-project.eu/open-source-tools/. He deleted the DQS repository for some reason but there's a mirror here: https://github.com/bozicb/dacura-1.

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Interesting, from Google trends, it seems that Haskell is very popular in China, compared to other regions. I wonder what can be the reason for this.

Competitive advantage.

By inflating the search results they'll encourage the competition to spend inordinate amounts of time learning cat theory and trying to get the compiler to understand their code. In the mean time they'll hack it together in Perl.

Sorry for the inappropriate about at humour, I couldn't resist.

Consider that fact that prime-minister of Singapore knows Haskell by now

http://wadler.blogspot.com/2015/04/prime-minister-of-singapo...

He is already quite good with C++

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/prime...

Audrey Tang is a Tawaainese Minister (not sure of what.. computing?) and wrote one of the first Perl6 implementations using Haskell I think.

"Digital Minister in charge of Social Innovation, Open Government and Youth Engagement".

Thanks for the clarification Audrey! Quick question...do you still actively code? If so, which technologies do you use? I assume a government politician (even for a very technical role) has little time for such things, so how do you stay up to date?

I still actively code. Most of the gov tech we deploy in Taiwan is based on civic tech, re-packaged to run on sandstorm.io (CodiMD is a good example). We also rely heavily on Pol.is and Rocket.chat.

Other than that, a lot of it is just automating chores — booking my office hour appointments, maintaining sayit.pdis.nat.gov.tw (part of the radical transparency protocol visit.pdis.tw), etc.

Non-work-related projects such as moedict.tw and Hackage/CPAN modules are mostly in maintenance mode, with occasional releases based on pull requests from the community.

Thanks for the reply and best of luck in your endeavors! I've never been very good with Haskell, but I may jump into Perl6 (Raku) soon.

Google is blocked in China, so I suspect that there are very few data points for Trends to draw on, as filtering the data to China, the graph seems raggedy, something like 4 searches/week. It also shows the spike in Haskell only occurred this week and says it is partial/incomplete data. So overall, probably just a data processing/extrapolation bug.

That's not to say that Haskell isn't used in China; there is a visualization group in Didi (Chinese Uber) that uses it, Haskell/FP user groups, university classes, etc. But there's no obvious reason that Haskell would have massively shot up in the past 3 days.

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