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by progman 3657 days ago
There are many attempts to justify the practical use of Haskell. However why does the Haskell community not have just proven the superiority of Haskell by an impressing showcase of working equivalents of Eclipse, Open Office, full-blown browsers, 3D games, and things like that?

AFAIK there is _nothing_ comparable in the Haskell world!

I know things like Leksah and FP-Complete's online editor but these things are far from being comparable to power IDEs like Eclipse. Haskell, as it is today, is a nice language for study purposes and academic use but it is barely used in the industry. Haskell is by far not so practical as the Haskell community wants it to be.

People have no right to complain without suggesting solutions. So do I. My suggestion: The Haskell community should develop languages based on Haskell which are much more practical, and which use all the nice power features of Haskell - the purity of functional programming for instance. Haskell is too cool to be wasted for academic use. It could be a very nice backend for really practical languages. The first promising attempts are there - IDRIS for instance.

1 comments

It kind of seems like you're grinding an axe that has nothing to do with my comment. But FWIW, I agree, but I also respect that Haskell is not designed to be a "successful" industry language. I'd love better tooling for it, but I also don't think it's a do-or-die kind of situation. Haskell has a fairly stable critical mass and a slow and steady upwards trajectory.