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> But then you hit a wall. Laziness makes for brutal debugging. Singly linked lists actually suck. Performance optimization is a black art To be fair, these issue are more-or-less solved by newer functional languages, such as OCaml or Rust.
You mean non-purely functional languages.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But then you hit a wall. Laziness makes for brutal debugging. Singly linked lists actually suck. Performance optimization is a black art To be fair, these issue are more-or-less solved by newer functional languages, such as OCaml or Rust.
You mean non-purely functional languages.
Well, even then, Rust does not only give you control over execution order, but also tight control over memory management, while keeping it safe.
Haskell allows for good reasoning about correctness. In OCaml, you can additionally reason about execution order, but memory management and garbage collector are still somewhat "unpredictable" (i.e. hard to reason about). On top of that, in Rust, you can reason clearly about memory usage and aliasing.
These new, modern languages follow a clear path about keeping quality and correctness (hence safety) while having more and more control over performance, without going back to low-level where you would loose clarity about correctness and safety.
(Note, however, that the distinction between correctness and performance is over-simplified here, because performance can also be part of correctness, e.g. for real-time systems, or in systems where scalability is an important requirement.)
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Have you written a well-researched case study? If not, please do. It's very hard to assess such statements otherwise. After at least six years of Haskell at SC, is it spreading to larger software in the bank? If so, how fast? If not, why not? Are other banks really spending orders of magnitude more on that kind of software? I've heard that SC adopted Haskell when Lennart Augustsson -- who wrote the first Haskell comp…
AFAIK, Credit Suisse only used Haskell for one particular project and that project came to a natural end. CS did end up adopting functional programming and F# became their strategic choice. I never claimed "orders of magnitude" productivity from a language alone. Haskell has every weakly-typed mainstream imperative language as a valid subset. You need good people, teams and processes to get the best out of the langua…
Second, that Haskell "has every weakly typed mainstream imperative language as a valid subset" (which I don't think is accurate, because projects are not built from scratch, and libraries match a certain programming style) does not mean that Haskell is worth it. For the sake of argument, suppose Haskell has a 5% improvement in maintenance cost over Python but a 10% higher cost of adoption, then it's not worth it.
> CS did end up adopting functional programming and F# became their strategic choice.
That's great, but doesn't have much to do with Haskell. The investment required for a pure-FP language like Haskell seems to be much greater than the investment in an imperative functional language like F# (or Clojure). It seems like CS, after having evaluated Haskell, decided that it may not be worth it.
And I believe that based on the enlisted properties/features, Elixir may qualify pretty well, too. What is more, Elixir may be a better choice in regards of time-to-market + developer happiness.
Clojure is quite quick to write and time to market can be very fast, as with most lisps, but you pay the price at debug time. We recently shipped a production app that had a small typo that the compiler would have easily caught, but instead it crashed the site when this one particular task was run.
If you were a developer with 10 yoe looking for something new to get into, what would you choose at this moment and thinking about the near future: Haskell, Scala or F#?
However, Haskell and OCaml are the more classic functional, static-typed languages, and while Haskell has more job opportunities than OCaml, it is probably the steepest learning curve and highest time commitment of all these languages.
> In summary we've seen that: Haskell decreases development time... Have we actually seen that or have you just asserted that? Is this really true, and if it is, by how much? Haskell has been around for a couple of decades now, and has had least two hype cycles (I remember that when I was in university in the late '90s, Haskell was the next big thing). It does not seem to expand significantly even within organization…
If you were a developer with 10 yoe looking for something new to get into, what would you choose at this moment and thinking about the near future: Haskell, Scala or F#?
If you were a developer with 10 yoe looking for something new to get into, what would you choose at this moment and thinking about the near future: Haskell, Scala or F#?
It depends what you are looking for. If you are looking for work then Scala beats the other two hands down. Then comes F# and Haskell somewhere in the end. If you're looking for enlightenment, pick up Haskell, maybe OCaml and skip F#.
And I believe that based on the enlisted properties/features, Elixir may qualify pretty well, too. What is more, Elixir may be a better choice in regards of time-to-market + developer happiness.
Warning: be warned before you commit to Haskell. Not all is rosy about Haskell. You may find yourself in quagmire if you don't know for sure what you are going to get from Haskell, especially from the libraries. Although this is true for other languages also, the library support for Haskell is yet far from satisfactory as compared to the library support found for Python/Java. The Haskell community seems to have been…