Comment by burkaman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by burkaman | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

BazQux is unfortunately not entirely open source, but it is my favorite RSS reader, is a profitable user-facing application, and is written partly in Haskell: https://bazqux.com/faq

https://github.com/bazqux/bazqux-urweb/tree/master/crawler

Off the top of my head I also know of Freckle (https://www.freckle.com/) and Co-Star (https://www.costarastrology.com/).

More importantly, this is not a Haskell book! I'm sure the author would be happy to see these ideas applied using Javascript or Scala or Java 14 or anything else.

> Haskell is considered a difficult language to learn, which is certainly true if you come from traditional procedural languages. But rest assured, this is not a Haskell book. You won’t need more than a passing understanding of the language’s syntax and a few high-level idioms. Everything you’ll need to know will be shown later in this section. The ideas present in these pages are adaptable to any piece of technology you’d like, though they might require strictly more discipline to maintain than is necessary in Haskell.

- Chapter 1.3.1, page 6

I'm not going to try to list all the user-facing applications written in any functional language, but I'm sure we can agree it is a much longer list.

"they might require strictly more discipline"

If it's /hard/ to use the language you have chosen for your book. Which is also the most prominent language in the space to write useful stuff then you need to address that right there on the landing page. Yeah? Is that not reasonable?

The Haskell list is very short. Why? Why is this a solution to that problem? Why is it not just yet another burito-like analogy for monads?

Frozen-bubble was great, slick and fun at least 15 years ago and is written in functional perl.

He's clearly trying to solve the Haskell problem of "We can't write apps" here. He says so.

I don't really know what to tell you, to me it's clear that this book is basically "lessons I've learned from Haskell that can be applied to any language". I think if it were trying to answer the questions you ask, it would say so.

Do you have the same issues with SICP using Scheme?

Finally, since this is Hacker News, I'll appeal to authority with Paul Graham: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

> Another unusual thing about this software was that it was written primarily in a programming language called Lisp. It was one of the first big end-user applications to be written in Lisp, which up till then had been used mostly in universities and research labs.

At the time, Lisp was 40 years old.

And they were pushing scheme as the future of everything. "We need a lambda key on the keyboard, maybe you people at HP can help us with that." Which wasn't entirely in jest.

I'm pretty sure Abelson and Sussman would have had an honest, will reasoned and nuanced answer as to why lisp had not replaced fortran and whether it will or even should. Those guys didn't go for rank boosterism.

Why no lisp? People didn't /own/ computers they could do what they liked with. You needed permission. Ask bill gates about that, he'll tell you... How could you hire lisp hackers? Not an issue for Paul. Done.

There are tens of thousands of us who learnt Haskell (and then maybe wrote a monad tutorial). How many applications? This tells us something. What?

The author has a theory.

The author has written a tutorial.

Show me the application!

I'm pretty sure you're reading this line wrong (though I don't blame you; the wording could probably be improved here). But I believe what the author is saying is "you can use these techniques in any language, but if you aren't using Haskell they might be more annoying to implement or maintain".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com