[akurilin]

There are a few startups out there who use it as their core tech. It's a sweet spot because you don't have any legacy code to support and it allows you to slap together fairly stable code fairly fast, at least once you get to know the basic tools. E.g. picking up Yesod (which, to be fair, isn't something you'll do in a couple hours) gives you all of the niceties and rapid prototyping of a tool like Rails, plus the obsession with type safety that gives you that handy line of technical credit.

[saosebastiao]

I can't imagine ever using Haskell for a startup. Unlike pg's python paradox, the only programmers I could imagine applying would be programming language theorists, toy programmers, and people who think they are productive (because arrows!), without ever having built anything ever. I would only do it if it meant I could hire John Macfarlane.

[akurilin]

We've actually had a pretty good time hiring for both Haskell and Clojure, it attracts a certain type of developer that a team like mine likes to work with.

There are certainly applicants from the groups you mentioned, and we do our best to filter them out.

It's interesting to hire people for stacks that most programmers have no production experience with (and have pretty much no way of getting), but it's certainly been done before.

In my view the tech in a startup pretty much doesn't matter. You either make something someone will pay for, or you don't, and then you die whether you use Fortran or Coq. Thus you might as well make yourself comfortable for the ride and use whatever you'll enjoy building stuff in, something you won't be easily bored of using and teaching others.

If you get to the stage where you need to quickly bring up to speed hundreds of developers, you pretty much already made it and you're experiencing growing pains, that's a good problem to have. Most of your code won't survive that scale without a serious rewrite anyway. You'll deal with that when you get there. The vast majority of people will never get that far.

[Ixiaus]

We use Haskell heavily at my startup and it's definitely a competitive edge and well suited to the many general programming problems we solve with it (amqp processing client, rest api, javascript heavy webapp w/ haskell web framework backing, db orm modelling, scrubbing and feeding data into influxdb, the list is long).

I know quite a few professional programmers who credit Haskell with making programming fun for them again (this holds true for me too and my production skill set includes php, c, c++, python, ruby, erlang, scheme, javascript, scala).

[codygman]

You should kill that misinformation with some Haskell experience ;)