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Comment by j_baker | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the author, but for different reasons. I think Haskell suffers from a "network effects" problem. It's not made for real world use cases because nobody is using it for the real world. And guess what? To get it adopted in the real world, it needs to support real world use cases.

I think that Haskell is doomed to a life of being a research toy language for the simple reason that that's what people are using it for, not because functional programming is necessarily much harder (because I don't think it is).

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I think we're actually just on the verge of the real world network effects starting to kick in. Technically, Haskell is something like 20 years old, but it reminds me in practice of how Python felt when I first came to it in the 1.5.2 era; promising, but missing a lot of infrastructure. It's starting to come in, though. The recent work on performant bytestrings and text representations was one big stopper, and the web frameworks for Haskell are, well, for one thing plural now, which is a nice sign, and many are improving rapidly.

If you're interested but unsure, you might take a look around but I don't feel all that guilty suggesting waiting another year or two.

Haskell has some notoriety in the financial industry. Obviously the language isn't used as extensively as, say C++ in commercial applications, but to go to such extremes as saying "nobody" uses it is plain wrong.

A couple of years ago, the only ads I would ever see on gmail in my haskell-cafe folder were for Jane Street Capital.

But they don't use Haskell. The ad basically asked if they could talk me down to OCaml. It came up for discussion on the list, and as I recall they preferred OCaml so they could write speedy code without getting hung up on lazy evaluation and its sometimes-difficult-to-predict execution time.

I still haven't looked at OCaml, although I had some exposure to SML in college. I'm looking at Scala these days (The type inference isn't even Hindley-Milner! Scandal!).

Have you seen all the libraries up on Hackage? Haskell probably has way more real-world stuff than you think.

Indeed I have. And most of those libraries are unfinished, poorly documented, or both. In short, it's great that people are putting the effort in. But Haskell has a long way to go still before it can compete with languages like python or ruby.

Don't get me wrong. I love Haskell, and am willing to put up with things I wouldn't put up with in other languages. But it makes it difficult for me to sell the language to others who will also have to work with it.

Sorry, but if we're talking about the quantity of poorly documented, broken, shat-straight-onto-github libraries out there, then ruby wins by a mile.

This isn't a challenge, but I'm curious what standout libraries that ruby or python have for which Haskell is lacking in a good alternative.

This is like claiming that Latin is a more useful language than English because almost all of the Latin you see is excellent writing by amazingly talented authors, whereas in English you have all these badly spelled text messages from your friends and Tweets from famous people and love notes from your sweetheart and baby babbles and second-grader scrawls and five-paragraph essays by high-school sophomores and job offers and breaking news and Reddit jokes and HN rants and Wikipedia articles and text-adventure games and comic-book speech balloons and bestselling dime novels to wade through in order to get to the well-written stuff.

And, of course, you rarely hear Latin mispronounced. In fact, the only thing rarer than hearing Classical Latin being mispronounced is hearing it being pronounced correctly. E.g.:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Caesar

In Greek, during Caesar's time, his family name was written Καίσαρ, reflecting its contemporary pronunciation. Thus, his name is pronounced in a similar way to the pronunciation of the German Kaiser.

On the bright side, Latin does embody a vast array of fascinating tidbits like that one. Plus you can read two-thousand-year-old poetry and cast spells like Harry Potter.

It's not the quantity, it's the proportion.

I discovered this when I looked at using Scala for a particular project. The ratio of good-to-unfinished/poor libraries was much lower than for Ruby. It was also evident that code style/programming conventions had not solidified yet; it looked like the early stages of Ruby, where people weren't yet quite sure how to write "rubyesque" code. (Take a look at Ruby's standard library; it's for the most part very much out of date with "modern style" Ruby.)

I see the same kind of uncertainty with some Haskell projects, like the Text.Regex package, which I tried to figure out how to use, and failed, even with repeated google searches to find examples. The author seems to attempt at a certain ambitious programming style based on typeclasses, but since its usage is undocumented (or was, at the time I tried it ~6 months ago) you have to be a level 15 Haskell wizard to untangle its API. Similar Ruby experiments exist, and are eventually deprecated because of "too much magic".

Sure, Ruby developers create way too many projects that are never finished (or equally bad, are abandoned). But the stable of good-or-great libraries is actually very solid. Probably more so for web development than other things (Ruby doesn't have anything like Python's NumPy, for example); if you start a web project with Ruby you can get absurdly productive by just harnessing a few existing gems.

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