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Comment by five18pm | Hacker News Reader

I thought the link would be of companies that use Haskell as their primary language of development, but it is more of companies which use/had used Haskell in one of their projects. The former would be interesting to know, if indeed such companies exist.

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At bu.mp, for our main backend repository `sloccount` says:

    python:       22961 (67.22%)
    ansic:         6338 (18.55%)
    haskell:       4378 (12.82%)
    sh:             482 (1.41%)

Edit: I should note, however, that the trend over the last year has been increasing that haskell share; you get just a lot done in not a lot of code... reuse is very good.

I didn't really believe Github's inflated line counts (125klocs) and was curious was sloccount would say...

I'm a bit surprised with the results. The sheer quantity of C/C++, brainless coding over a few days, was impressive. Experience buys something I guess :-/

    haskell:      65025 (88.22%)
    cpp:           6944 (9.42%)
    ansic:         1133 (1.54%)
    python:         391 (0.53%)
    java:           204 (0.28%)
    sh:               7 (0.01%)

Haskell has much more of a group inside of a company will use it as their primary environment then adopting it wholesale. Haskell is used extensively in trading with almost every major bank and hedge fund using it, although no one talks about it. It is also extensively used in energy companies.

There are a few companies out there that use it as their primary language such as Tsuru Capital and my company, Alpha Heavy Industries. By definition companies using it as their primary language will be smaller companies. Standard Chartered has a very large Haskell group.

Which energy companies and for what?

The major problem with the 'smaller languages' is that sometimes, even if you want to, and can use it effectively, it's difficult to interface with other systems.

For example, services using SOAP. Drivers to DBs and other systems.

Sometimes it's easier to have your core login in Haskell for example, then make it interface with something else in Java/C#/etc which will have plugins for everything.

Drivers to DBs

I found this with OCaml too, so I decided to do something about it: http://gaiustech.github.com/ociml/

I can't reveal that, but major ones with an international presence. Most use it for modeling. They do lots of modeling.

That Haskell is used extensively in trading is quite interesting to know. This distinction did not come out that well on the wiki link. This is probably the reorganization that the page needs. Split in to sections highlighting companies which use Haskell as primary language, then split along industry lines.

Highlighting companies which use Haskell as primary language will be beneficial to both the language and the companies. Brings along a trust factor that real money can be made while using on Haskell.

OCaml is also used extensively. I believe Jane Street Capital's entire codebase is in OCaml.

Jane Street or pointers to them seem to be the primary driver of OCaml on the internet. That's cool, but worrying in lack of diversity.

Are you heavy industrial? Or did you just like the name? I was so disappointed when I discovered Urban Airship didn't actually operate airships...

We manufacture alpha mining equipment for the financial markets.

Only way to get rich in a gold rush, selling shovels.

Depending on how some endeavors pan out, my wee company, WellPosed, is likely to be in that rarified category in the near future :-)

(strictly speaking it may be 2-3 distinct enterprises under the same umbrella, but same thing). Also some interesting stuff on the algorithmic & open source pipeline that'll be made available as those services come out.

(a vague summary of the pending products/services can be seen in this month's who's hiring thread.)

Amsterdam based Silk is built in Haskell (http://www.silkapp.com/), it's one of the few companies I know of but I guess they do exist.

That would probably limit a lot the number and diversity of the potential candidates. As a complete outsider I find more interesting that Haskell is used for even few projects inside, say, Credit Suisse than a one-man shop nobody has heard of that uses Haskell exclusively; YMMV.

There is at least one: Scrive. Their codebase is almost completely Haskell. I think the only other language they use is Javascript for web stuff (but their web apps are built with Happstack).

https://scrive.com

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