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Comment by leonsegal | Hacker News Reader

What if the project became popular, scaled up and the original developer needed help with it? As Haskell is a niche language, wouldn't it be harder to find Haskell developers to come on board?

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I don't know about Haskell specifically, but the question isn't "how many developers are able and willing to work with $language?" but "how many developers are able and willing to work with $language relative to the number of companies hiring for it?".

For example, Elm is still a tiny, niche language, but from what I hear it's relatively easy to hire for Elm because there are many more people who want to work with it than there are companies that are hiring for it.

Our company is also using a lot of haskell for our projects. Since we adopted haskell we had a lot more very talented developers apply.

I think this only might be a problem if you don't want to hire remote.

The talent pool is probably smaller, but passionate. It's many people's dream to write Haskell (or other FP) for a living, myself included.

If I may shill, if anyone is hiring for Haskell or FP roles, please let me know.

IOHK are, and have some fairly team members in the Haskell community :)

https://apply.workable.com/io-global/ https://iohk.io/en/team/

At digitally induced we're always looking for great developers to add to our haskell team: https://www.digitallyinduced.com/JobPositions :)

Yes, it is harder to find developers for niche languages and technologies. On the other hand you have a pool of enthusiasts looking for the opportunity to use something more niche, like Haskell.

This argument + response keep coming up. If a niche language could never pick up steam we'd still be stuck with assembly. All languages started off as niche.

It's more interesting what constitutes niche, AND as the parent notes what constitutes a "language to have enthousiasm for".

VB, JScript, ActionScript, ColdFusion and BASIC are all niche (nowadays), but without enthusiasm its not interesting.

Besides the niche-enthusiasm, there is also something for "usefulness". Haskell+ecosystem (and others in the FP camp) bring a nice set of features to the table not often found in other languages.

> All languages started off as niche.

definitely not. Java was presented at SunWorld. When C# came out there were ads in computer programming zines. Swift came out on a wide concert stage with most of the Apple community having their eyes riveted on the video stream: https://youtu.be/MO7Ta0DvEWA?t=45

All that ensures that the "critical mass" adoption to get the language out of niche status would be a non-issue

Even those languages start off with a small user base, right?

And some return to small user bases :) I think the number of VB programmers has drop to level below Haskell nowadays.

> I think the number of VB programmers has drop to level below Haskell nowadays.

ahahaha

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fm%2F01dpgv,%2F...

> This argument + response keep coming up. If a niche language could never pick up steam we'd still be stuck with assembly. All languages started off as niche.

No they didn't all start off as a niche. They started off with a small user base of early adopters. Haskell is a niche because it's been around long enough to pick up users. There is a difference between a new language with a small number of early adopters and a niche language that has been around for decades.

And languages like Swift did not start off small.

You're right. A niche is not built in a day.

Our startup runs on Haskell. I was worried about this initially but in practice finding great Haskell developers has been no more or less difficult than finding great developers in general.

Yeah, finding a decent Javascript or C++ developer is actually very difficult - everyone thinks they know C++ and Javascript when in fact only a small minority actually do.

I guess if the business idea really took off, then it doesn't really matter what language is this part of logic written in -- you can already wrap it in as a service with Web API -- or simply rewrote it in another more popular language.

Not all startups bring big VC money, for the real world a full rewrite of your stack usually cost too much to be viable.

In my experience, no.

There are probably more people who use Haskell or want to use Haskell as their main language than there are job openings to work on a Haskell code base.

If you're willing to work with a remote team your inbox will probably never sit empty.

This would mean that whatever the level of the contributors, it would be harder to ship bugs in production.

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