Hacker News Reader

Comment by dfee | Hacker News Reader

Is it viable to build a traditional web product/company on top of Haskell?

That sounds like a silly question - but I’m serious. I’m enamored by the beauty of FP, but I’m not sure if there’s enough tooling or libraries to get to market.

For example - GraphQL. There are two packages (mu and morpheus), but neither clearly document their feature parity in relation to other packages for other languages - and things like dataloaders.

The Reddit almost encourages people to use a different language, too.

View on HN

I have never tried, but my impression is basically "You could, but why would you?" Haskell had a big jump in popularity around a decade ago, but it didn't gain traction with the "i'll grind 17 hours a day to become a rockstar ninja whatever" demographic that every language seems to bootstrap itself off of. I won't speculate as to why, but the end result is that Haskell is missing a lot of "adapter"-style libraries and instead is just a bunch of building blocks. Yeah you can write great stuff in Haskell, but also you have no choice. No one else has written what you need so you'll be writing it yourself.

The benefits of Haskell don't even _really_ seem that useful when you're just writing yet another big ass crud app where the main goal is to convert json into some other json and then maybe render it. I could see it making more sense in specific domains where the main challenge is wrangling a complex mess of business logic into something you can be confident about. Not like "is my shopping cart correct" but "how can I optimize this PCB design to reduce trace length and total area?"

> The benefits of Haskell don't even _really_ seem that useful when you're just writing yet another big ass crud app where the main goal is to convert json into some other json and then maybe render it.

The benefits have been massive for me, and I'm often doing basically this.

Maybe you should just try it?

You would be surprised how much Haskell is practical for boring stuff, try it out http://learnyouahaskell.com/

Yes, it's possible to build a traditional web company with Haskell. We've made IHP exactly for that :) It's like Rails/Django but for Haskell. https://ihp.digitallyinduced.com/ We specifically try to be batteries-includes (like rails), so you don't have to think too much about what libraries to use, the core of IHP can get you very far without needing to manually decide between libraries.

IHP even won a G2 badge, which is kind of funny and ironic for a Haskell project :D https://www.g2.com/products/ihp/reviews

You absolutely can. Its a great platform for this.

There may not be as wide a variety of libraries as you would hope, but that's true of any smaller language.

The main thing you need to be able to do is have the wisdom to avoid the footguns. They're quite different from the footguns in other languages. in general, using Haskell well requires a good bit of experience with it, and knowledge of who in the community are selling false solutions.

> Is it viable to build a traditional web product/company on top of Haskell?

Yes. I've been doing it for years. I also employ several Haskell developers.

We're happy.

> I’m not sure if there’s enough tooling or libraries to get to market.

There are.

In 2015-2016 SF Haskell meetup used to be hosted by an ed-tech company that used Haskell as the main language, so maybe viable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com