[imanaccount247]

>I know a lot of people encharmed by it, but no-one productive (i.e. delivering products quickly; it's not the same as solving pure, mathematical problems).

Is this actually true, or is it "true in your heart"? Very few people use haskell for solving "pure mathematical problems". People use it for things like developing the fastest microkernel in existence, doing high volume trading, making games, and writing boring old web apps. References to "pure mathematical problems" and implying nobody is actually doing anything with haskell come off as sounding like second (or third, or fourth) hand FUD. We taught our PHP team haskell. They had their first project in production in three months. There's nothing special about math and haskell.

[stared]

Links or it didn't happen.

I don't imply that nobody uses it for solving practical problems. Just, I made my judgement based on:

- friends (I know, it may be biased),

- GitHub codes I use (and in general, popularity),

- blog posts on Haskell (I encounter mostly language-oriented; less problem-oriented like "let's make a 3d game", "web scraping", "machine learning", "web dev" etc).

[chas]

It sounds like imanaccount247 is from IMVU, they wrote up their experience with Haskell here: http://engineering.imvu.com/2014/03/24/what-its-like-to-use-...

It was previously discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7472452

[codygman]

If I took time to link to each one of those would it change your opinion any?

[stared]

Likely. Ideally with code tutorials/examples rather than "me and my friends changed X to Haskell and we liked it".

I mean, it's not I am anti-Haskell or something (it is clearly on my list things to learn), and I am theoretically-inclined (I did quantum physics and pure mathematics). Moreover, I am biased towards clever, succinct solutions rather that horrible code that "just works, somehow".

Yet, for practical problems I do things that work, even if it is JavaScript code, which is not even close to "pure" or "nice".

[stared]

OK, I see things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8813313 or http://kukuruku.co/hub/haskell/how-to-implement-deutschs-alg... or http://haskelldata.com/

[saosebastiao]

I'm interested. I probably wont ever use Haskell again, but it would be nice to see that there is more to the community than the self-congratulatory cleverness competition that I experienced.

[imanaccount247]

>Links or it didn't happen.

To what? I'm supposed to link you to reality? How about since haskell is a general purpose, turing complete language, you demonstrate that there's some magical reason that it can only be used for "pure math problems" and nobody can be productive in it doing "real work". Why should a random nonsense claim be given the standing of fact and need to be disproved?

>friends (I know, it may be biased)

That's why I asked if it was true in your heart. Lots of people say things they think sound reasonable and believable based on other third hand information, but which are in fact made up. I have a very hard time believing you have so many friends into haskell and unable to write programs in it. Especially after teaching a bunch of PHP people who had never heard of functional programming (and half had never heard of types!) haskell in a few short lessons. Either your friends are some crazy statistical anomaly, or my developers are. Or perhaps your friends are apocryphal.

>GitHub codes I use

"I don't use anything written in haskell so you can't write anything practical in it" is a pretty poor argument.

>I encounter mostly language-oriented

Where are you encountering them? And are you sure you aren't just misinterpreting "practical" blog posts as "academic" because they mention something you don't want to hear like monads? Even most things I would assume you classify as "language-oriented" are still about solving practical problems.

http://ro-che.info/articles/2014-12-26-monad-control-type-sy...

That might sound scary to people who don't know haskell, but it is about solving a common issue with web development (and other server type programming) in a nice reusable library. Do you really think there's tens of thousands of people just sitting around writing haskell code that does nothing for no reason?

[phamilton]

It would be interesting to define product as "dollars produced" or something of that sort. Then rank languages by net product and then by net productivity (net product over time).

I would expect it all to be heavily skewed towards high volume trading.