Hacker News Reader

Comment by fnord123 | Hacker News Reader

>Haskell (leading FP language)

Scala is the leading FP language (thanks to Spark, Kafka, Akka, and other massive projects). And TIOBE puts Scheme and Lisp ahead of Haskell. And Emacs Lisp probably has more installs than GHC.

View on HN

Probably depends on the definition of leading; I'd guess that Haskell is probably used more than any other (Turing-complete, to exclude Gallina, etc.) functional language within programming language research, but you're right that in terms of usage in industry etc. Scala is probably on top.

> I'd guess

Why would you guess?

> functional language within programming language research

Why is this [more] important? Why not e.g. Erlang which almost certainly pumps more bits per day than Haskell.

> Why would you guess?

Because I'm basing it on my experience doing research in PLT, but this is of course purely anecdotal and my areas of research interest lie away from the likes of Haskell, so I would not wish to make a false claim by stating it as fact.

> Why is this [more] important?

I never said that it was, only that depending on what is meant by "leading", industry usage might not be relevant. Since Scala is by far the more used language I think it's fair to assume that (without meaning to put words into mouths) the original commenter might have been talking about PLT research as opposed to usage in industry.

Programming language research is a pretty small and arbitrary space with regard to overall usage, isn't it?

Yes it is, but if "leading functional language" means "on the cutting edge of research into functional languages" then that might well be used to describe Haskell.

If leading refers to overall usage in industry, then sure, it's not really relevant.

Leading more in terms of influence than usage.

Most of Scala is derived from Haskell and even now the ecosystem heavily looks at what did/didn't work e.g. Cats, ZIO.

> Most of Scala is derived from Haskell

Scala had a lot of influences, but the first two papers on Scala have references to SML and Ocaml but none for Haskell[1]. Make of that what you will.

> Leading more in terms of influence than usage.

Is Haskell influential? By what metric? Impact factor of papers published?

Here are some features that Standard ML had which were cutting edge:

    strong static typing
    automatic type inference
    exception handling
    pattern matching
    parametric polymorphism
    first class functions

Basically all of these features are features any compiled language would enjoy today. SML is a very influential language despite not being used much in industry.

Here are features which Haskell is known for aside from the above:

    laziness
    strict immutability 
    do-notation
    typeclasses
    operator overloading with symbols like +++ and ==<

Of these, typeclasses are wicked and influenced Rust's traits (the rest of the language being heavily influenced by [oca]ml). The rest are not even desirable. Haskell doesn't seem very influential in comparison. Maybe it's influential because it warns us to not default to laziness or go full strict immutability?

This is distinct from e.g. Erlang where the features like process management through the supervisor, mnesia, and so on are highly desirable for any developer even if other languages/platforms haven't implemented them as a standard component. (, vs . for line termination, not so much).

[1] https://www.scala-lang.org/docu/files/IC_TECH_REPORT_200433...., http://lampwww.epfl.ch/~odersky/papers/ScalableComponent.pdf

Reply on news.ycombinator.com