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Comment by LukeHoersten | Hacker News Reader

For those not involved in the Haskell community, Simon Marlow worked full time on the GHC compiler and specifically run-time system for many years. Along with Simon Peyton-Jones, he's huge in the Haskell world. Marlow also wrote the very excellent "Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell" book.

Facebook also employs Bryan O'Sullivan, an epic Haskell library writer (Aeson, Attoparsec, Text, Vector, and on and on http://hackage.haskell.org/user/BryanOSullivan). Bryan also co-authored the "Real World Haskell" book.

So Facebook has hired two prolific Haskellers and probably others I don't know about.

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It really shows what an investment they are willing to make in the language. They aren't just training up internal engineers, they're bringing in some of the best in the community.

I'm hugely excited that Facebook is making this investment and giving some of the developments back to the community. There are many smaller companies that would be interested in Haskell but don't have the resources or expertise to tackle some of these complicated problems.

Facebook is blazing the trail for production Haskell and the rest of us can follow.

One thing's for sure, Facebook staffing did an amazing job hiring Haskell devs ;-)

Bryan was acquhired and I think he hired Simon.

That's a bit sad a great language like Haskell (I haven't personally used it but heard great things about it) is used for a hippie thing such as Facebook. Facebook doesn't even have much of a future, its a hippie fad just like Myspace was, eventually they'll get bored and find some new hippiespace social network: Snapchat, Whatsapp, whatever.

You know, you're not alone in thinking along these lines, but, if you would have just put a wee bit more effort into your wording, you could have made a good point out of it. Too bad you kept it even way below average Facebook post quality.

Oh and seeing how I'm actually responding now anyway, there's one more thing: use of the word "Hippie" does not actually qualify as name calling, you do know that, right? I do hope so; you see, it is mostly used in the cartoon Southpark, by a kid who is both the biggest bully of them all, and the most pathetic one as well. The ancipitality is really obvious, so I'm curious: was the satirical context so lost on you that you decided to copy this cartoon character's behaviour verbatim instead? Because in that case I think you could actually gain one or two social skills from Facebook! Chop chop, be a good lad now and give 'er a try, eh?

A side note: The Haskell runtime is written in C so Simon Marlow is also one of the best low level C hackers I've ever met.

Marlow also famously says that the doesnt understand the zygohistomorphic prepromorphisms in Haskell.

All correct, but I don't think Bryan O'Sullivan does much haskell these days. He's the manager of some sort of "Developer productivity" team. The Hack programming language came out of his team [1] (tho he wrote a blog post to contrast all the media coverage and say "my people did it, not me! [2]); he spoke about his activity at the last F8 [3]. But he does teach Haskell at Facebook after work :) [4]

[1] https://twitter.com/bos31337/status/446679462835273728 [2] http://www.serpentine.com/blog/2014/03/28/where-credit-belon... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0VH78ye4yY [4] https://twitter.com/bos31337/status/476536457000415232

EDIT: spelling

I've seen bigger slackers: https://github.com/bos

I've worked with him to resolve some defects in attoparsec the last few months and I can tell you he is still writing lots of Haskell. He's just in maintenance mode and probably will not start new libraries any time soon.

Bos manages the internal tooling team at Facebook. It is little surprise that Facebook's internal tooling is acquiring a functional programming flavor.

Speaking of functional/Haskell network tooling, this is a really cool project: http://www.pfq.io

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