[michaelochurch]

Where do you work? What has your experience been using Haskell "in the RealWorld"? I'd love to know more about this. My email address is michael.o.church at Google's email service.

I got seriously into Haskell a few months ago, but I've used ML in algorithmic trading and was a major fan.

I feel like it does us a disservice to complain about Haskell's (admittedly, warty) Exception system or "cabal hell" when what is actually going on is that we're holding the language to a higher standard. I agree that functions like head, fail, and possibly non-strict foldl, are warty; but these issues are downright minuscule when you consider what Haskell (language and community) brings to the table. (Also, every other language has warts.) The fact that our complaints about Haskell are minor annoyances compared to other languages' drawbacks, to me, signifies that the language got the major things right.

[boothead]

I've just finished a stint running a team building a start up in Haskell and clojurescript. It's been an amazing year, and for me has completely vindicated my view that not only is Haskell fine for real world use, but for a number of reasons that it's a superior tool to use. I'm ben <at> perurbis <dot> com if you'd like me to expand on that a bit (I don't want to hijack this thread too much).

[tel]

The exception system that Harper was complaining about really was terrifically bad. It's all based on a form of limited reflection, but previously was implemented in a way that let you pretty regularly and possibly accidentally lie to the compiler. Nasty stuff, now gone.

[jonsterling]

Yeah... I would say that Haskell's exceptions are still far worse than ML's, but I am not aware that they are unsafe anymore.