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Comment by JoelMcCracken | Hacker News Reader

Haskell does have an issue of people using it being more interested in doing clever things and researching topics than building cool applications.

Haskell jobs do exist, I have one of them. The big problem is that there are more people who want to do those jobs than there are jobs, so they seem very scarce.

But anyway there are also a number of investment banks I have heard that use Haskell as their “secret weapon” and do not advertise it, in fact those who could speak to details are all under NDA.

Personally I am hoping to help with this issue by building cool open source things in Haskell (and purescript)

I was skeptical for years for all the reasons you said, but I finally decided to set my skepticism aside and see for myself, and oh boy is Haskell great. It has a lot of problems, but I consider myself at least 2x more productive in Haskell.

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> “secret weapon” and do not advertise it

Both Standard Chartered and Barclays loudly advertise that they use Haskell.

A quick web search turns up their job offers on Reddit, and both also send people to conferences such as Haskell eXchange, to talk about their team tasks, structure, and size. Example: [1]

Their code bases were discussed on HN before, e.g. [2].

Standard Chartered also funded the development of GHCs low-latency, non-stop-the-world, incremental GC, for 2 years until it was recently released [3].

[1] https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/9098-haskell-in-the-lar...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13073605

[3] https://www.well-typed.com/blog/2019/10/nonmoving-gc-merge/

Is Standard Chartered the bank that actually uses its own eager subset of Haskell and built everything in it from scratch?

Yes Standard Chartered does have its own strict Haskell scripting language (Mu). But it mostly wraps C/C++ quant libraries, it's used as a alternative to Python (because Python is a bad idea at scale). GHC is used too and is what Mu was built in.

I'm not sure if you're being facetious or asking a genuine question. The answer is "yes", with the exception of the word "actually". The "eager subset" was written to target a pre-existing runtime, which before then only supported an in-house, fairly poorly-designed, functional language called Lambda. Some of the team there wanted to be able to use Haskell instead (understandably).

For stuff that doesn't require that runtime (as convenient as it is) they just use familiar old lazy GHC. My understanding is that they are progressively moving more and more to GHC, although my knowledge is five years out of date.

> I'm not sure if you're being facetious or asking a genuine question.

A genuine one. I remember a presentation by a bank about their use of Haskell, and wasn't sure if it was Standard Chartered. I remember they had the subset, and mentioned they basically had to a lot from scratch to interface with various systems.

And now that I have the name, I found a link to someone's copy: https://dshevchenko.biz/hs-research/Haskell-in-the-Large.pdf (used to be available at code.haskell.org). My recollection of the paper isn't perfect :)

> My understanding is that they are progressively moving more and more to GHC, although my knowledge is five years out of date.

Ah, thank you!

There are numerous others who do not, though.

> use Haskell as their “secret weapon” and do not advertise it, in fact those who could speak to details are all under NDA.

I remember hearing this said about Perl back in the day! Language X is so awesome businesses use it in secret because they don't want their competitors to discover the secret to their success.

Not saying it couldn't happen, but you can say it about any language and it can't really be disproven.

Right. It’s frustrating. I’m not under NDA with them but I don’t want to get anyone into trouble, but even if I did name names I don’t think anyone would back it up.

This is why we need more publicity-visible Haskell success stories.

If the "secret weapon"-theory is true, then I guess the companies loudly proclaiming they use Haskell could just be trying to trick their competitors into using it...

Yeah I mean you can take it a lot of ways lol. I think some companies are just secretive about their practices and others are open.

Really the thing that convinced me to really dig into haskell was that there were so many things that I wanted to learn but so much of the extra information had roots in haskell topics. So i basically said "to achieve my goals I need to know haskell even if i never use it for anything practical".

Slowly, as I learned more, I realized it is great. I wish I had chosen to learn haskell 10 years ago instead of like two years ago.

Not only can you, it is standardly asserted about a variety of obscure, fun languages. Lisp, APL, and J/K spring to mind.

Top blockchain development in Haskell soon on Cardano... https://prod.playground.plutus.iohkdev.io/

This is a very good comment.

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