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Comment by reagency | Hacker News Reader

This is impressive, and in line with Haskell's philosophy to "avoid success at all costs".

As a mere mortal programmer, who knows a little Haskell, my takeaway is that if you want to run Haskell in at web scale for a a large userbase, you need the language's primarily compiler author to help build the application and to modify the Haskell compiler to make it performant. And you also need your team led by a 20-year-veteran Haskell expert who is one of the language's handful of luminaries whonwrotr a plurality of its main libraries. What are the rest of us to do, who aren't at Facebook?

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This is an incredibly stupid takeaway. Facebook can hire the best software engineers and computer scientists in the world, so of course they hire such people and these people build stuff at Facebook.

That doesn't mean other people can't use Haskell to build web applications.

> That doesn't mean other people can't use Haskell to build web applications.

Very few companies do, though, so OP's point still stands.

This article would be a much better ad for Haskell if it weren't written by one of GHC's main author. The article also casts doubt on whether Haskell was picked because it's the best tool for the job or because of the team's familiarity with it.

Do you know a better language for implementing an eDSL that needs to be pure? Also familiarity does matter. With the requirement of needing a pure eDSL though I think Haskell would be the easiest path for most teams.

You don't hire Simon Marlow to hack PHP.

> Haskell's philosophy to "avoid success at all costs".

How? I think you are misunderstanding the philosophy. Like SPJ once explained, its 'avoid (success at all costs)' and not '(avoid success) at all costs'. It basically means, 'don't compromise on your principles in order to achieve success'.

avoid $ success at all costs

I've always interpreted it as both "(avoid success) at all costs" and "avoid (success at all costs)" - the former as a joke and the latter a serious guideline.

> web scale for a a large userbase

Yes, it might take some effort to scale things across a 1.4 billion users. Now, in what language wouldn't that be a challenge?

I suppose if you're one of the "many" other companies that are approaching 2 billion active users/month, you might need to put some thought into your systems too...

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