[maz1b]

I think perhaps contrary to popular belief, Mercury choosing Haskell and their early leadership having such a storied experience in it probably played some non-insignificant role in their success.

As a customer of Mercury, it's truly one of the critical companies my toolkit, and I just can't help but feel that their choosing of Haskell made their progress, development and overall journey that much better. I realize that you can make this argument with most languages, and it's not to say that a FP lang like Haskell is a recipe for success, but this intentional decision particularly pre "vibe coding" and the LLM era seems particularly prescient, of course combined with their engineering culture that was detailed in the post.

[1024bits]

I'd also wager that hiring generalists with no prior experience in the language actually helped them, because they got to instill their culture and style from the ground up with their new hires. Pre vibe-coding, most of those people would'nt have wanted to just jump in and hack away with zero instruction.

[ipnon]

I have noticed that everything in their app Just Works. It's very satisfying coming from other services!

[jwsteigerwalt]

I feel the same way. I only started using Mercury about 6 months ago and I’m continually impressed that it just makes sense.

[spopejoy]

I would counter that it was probably their startup-oriented fintech focus and execution that led to their success. I love good tech culture as much as the next HNer but I've seen companies with great tech die because of bad biz focus.

I might further argue that the startup-y fintech culture led to good tech culture. The fact that they didn't start as a bank (as opposed to say SVB) means that they didn't have to be as conservative, or integrate with some horrific ancient tech stack.

I'm pleased they've had such success with Haskell, but much like Jane Street and OCAML, I think the language choice is almost accidental*, as much as the companies would like you to believe otherwise.

I would like to know however what they're doing for front-end. I would guess that all of this Haskell is back-end only.

*EDIT by "accidental" I mean to the business side. Jane St had some good trades, Mercury had great focus and execution. They also have some good tech :)