Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dmead 314 days ago
yea I agree. haskell was my primary language for several years in the 00s. it's since had almost zero industry uptake. Don't come at me with jane street or the one off startup.

I thought for a while I'd be able to focus on getting jobs that liked haskell. it never happened.
1 comments
chriswarbo 314 days ago
I certainly wouldn't focus on getting a Haskell job. Yet they are out there; e.g. my current job is Haskell, and happens to be in the same sector (public transport) as my last job (which was mostly Scala).

Also, I've found Haskell appropriate for some one-off tasks over the years, e.g.

- Extracting a load of cross-referenced data from a huge XML file. I tried a few of our "common" languages/systems, but they all ran out of memory. Haskell let me quickly write something efficient-enough. Not sure if that's ever been used since (if so then it's definitely tech debt).

- Testing a new system matched certain behaviours of the system it was replacing. This was a one-person task, and was thrown away once the old system was replaced; so no tech debt. In fact, this was at a PHP shop :)

link
dmead 314 days ago
Yea of course, its not really the focus for me either way. my point was that how great haskell seemed in grad school didn't match up with the real world interest.

I use spark for most tasks like that now. Guido stole enough from haskell that pyspark is actually quite appealing for a lot of these tasks.

link
instig007 314 days ago
> Guido stole enough from haskell that pyspark is actually quite appealing for a lot of these tasks.

He didn't do his homework. Guido or whoever runs things around the python language committee nowadays didn't have enough mental capacity to realize that the `match` must be a variable bindable expression and never a statement to prevent type-diverging case branches. They also refuse to admit that a non-blocking descriptor on sockets has to be a default property of runtime and never assigned a language syntax for, despite even Java folks proving it by example.

link
dmead 313 days ago
I agree. but we get phillip wadler's list comprehensions
link