[lucianbr]

Reading a row from a database and putting it on the screen, and reading some numbers from the keyboard and putting them in the database. These things I would not call computation. I mean sure, displaying needs to compute coordinates for where to light up pixels, but that's all already written. I just call it. Same with updating btrees when writing to the db.

I'm guessing if all you do is this kind of db - screen - keyboard and back stuff, haskell is not very useful, if not actively a hindrance.

[benreesman]

Haskell is actively a hindrance if one is mostly moving bytes from one place to another: the only thing that matters when you need to talk to 7 databases each different is fashion. The language that has bindings to all 7 each with a zillion users is the one you should use.

If you’re moving a lot of undifferentiated bytes the language you should use is historically C, more recently C++ (which is still the standard), or maybe soon Rust (which looks to become the standard).

If IO is a small part of your problem, performance needs to be good but not insane, and you’re mostly thinking about algorithms and mathematics?

Haskell is a very pragmatic choice there. OCaml is strong here too, and TypeScript is a very cool compromise between “mainstream” and “we do math here”.