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Comment by BasDirks | Hacker News Reader

I'm a big Haskell fan, but lambda-loving academia needs to get off its ass and spent a bit more braincycles on fulfilling Haskell's potential as a web language. Node.js community is simply far more energetic and ballsy. I'm quite confident both Node.js and Haskell are here to stay.

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There's a lot more to programming than building websites. Haskell seems a lot more interesting for solving problems that are actually hard.

I heard this argument a lot of times, both in defense of Haskell and Lisp.

Does Haskel ability to solve "hard" problems makes it somehow unfit for solving "easy" problems?

Or, to put it the other way, why do you think it can solve "hard" problems if it can't even solve "easy" problems?

Oh, I think it is perfectly possible to do webprogramming in Haskell. In fact, Haskell would be my first choice if doing web development. In my opinion the reason there is not much focus on web programming in Haskell is that (based on my observations in #haskell) the average Haskell programmer would rather work on these "hard" problems then on web programming.

Not to get into the whole Blub language argument, but I daresay the average Haskell programmer is more advanced then your average web programmer. This is not to imply the latter is somehow easier or trivial (working IE support? I'm not ever gonna call that easy....) but it could explain a different focus of the community. Resulting in less webprogramming being done. That said, I've seen 5i7 Haskell webprogramming frameworks pop up in the past 2 years, so I'm not the only one who thinks it is perfectly suited for that.

I wouldn't say average haskell programmers just want to tackle hard problems, I'd say it's more that average Haskellers are experts or have interests in very specific fields that don't tie in with the 'mainstream' programming mindset.

You give web programmers Rails instead of Haskell for the same reasons you give Jim in accounting Excel and Access instead of Rails.

Why does academia need to do that?

it's definitely being worked on

http://www.yesodweb.com/ http://snapframework.com/ http://happstack.com/index.html http://blog.on-a-horse.org/

I am sure there are more.

Yes, although some of those are more "worked on" than others; the last entry at blog.on-a-horse.org is from almost a year ago, and the page at haskell.on-a-horse.org has been broken for a while.

Saying "some" is somewhat disingenuous as haskell on a horse is the only one not being actively developed at this time.

Warp and Snap. Google them.

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