Why isn't Haskell popular in industry?
palgorithm.co.uk
Why isn't Haskell popular in industry?
1–10 of 145 posts
Re: Why isn't Haskell popular in industry?
#2Every language has a catalyst that pushes it from obscurity into mainstream use. Whether it be a project (Ruby on Rails), a programmer (Linus Torvalds -> C), a company (Google -> Python), or a library (Boost -> C++), there is always a force behind adoption.
Most languages undergo a "fad period", where it's hip and cool to write in it and people just do it because other people do it. Clojure is going through this right now, as are Scala and (arguably) Haskell.
We'll just have to see. I honestly hope Haskell becomes popular. Judging by http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/haskell.php, performance really isn't an issue. It's more of just an issue of programmer adoption and a willingness to throw yourself out there to spend some time to learn how to think outside of the imperative programming box.
Re: Why isn't Haskell popular in industry?
#3Actually a decent post and discussion.
Re: Why isn't Haskell popular in industry?
#4Every language has a catalyst that pushes it from obscurity into mainstream use. Whether it be a project (Ruby on Rails), a programmer (Linus Torvalds -> C), a company (Google -> Python), or a library (Boost -> C++), there is always a force behind adoption. Most languages undergo a "fad period", where it's hip and cool to write in it and people just do it because other people do it. Clojure is going through this righ…
I must be parsing this incorrectly because it looks like you're arguing that C was obscure before Linus used it.
Re: Why isn't Haskell popular in industry?
#5Every language has a catalyst that pushes it from obscurity into mainstream use. Whether it be a project (Ruby on Rails), a programmer (Linus Torvalds -> C), a company (Google -> Python), or a library (Boost -> C++), there is always a force behind adoption. Most languages undergo a "fad period", where it's hip and cool to write in it and people just do it because other people do it. Clojure is going through this righ…
I must be parsing this incorrectly because it looks like you're arguing that C was obscure before Linus used it.
You're not.
I want to add that he was just the first guy that popped into my head when I thought C. I questioned it at first too, but the more I thought about it, Linux itself could have just as well have been written in Pascal or Lisp. If it had been, perhaps a lot of the tools, drivers, etc that interact with Linux would've been written in that language as well?
Perhaps a better example is needed.
Re: Why isn't Haskell popular in industry?
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
I must be parsing this incorrectly because it looks like you're arguing that C was obscure before Linus used it.
You're not. I want to add that he was just the first guy that popped into my head when I thought C. I questioned it at first too, but the more I thought about it, Linux itself could have just as well have been written in Pascal or Lisp. If it had been, perhaps a lot of the tools, drivers, etc that interact with Linux would've been written in that language as well? Perhaps a better example is needed.
C was never obscure in the way that Haskell is now and C++ once was. It was popularized by the project for which it was invented: UNIX, of which Linux is a two-decades-late clone. C's prevalence has always been closely tied to that of UNIX.
Re: Why isn't Haskell popular in industry?
#7Even thought I don't agree on this argument, I would add:
- Because it's not OO.
Re: Why isn't Haskell popular in industry?
#8Every language has a catalyst that pushes it from obscurity into mainstream use. Whether it be a project (Ruby on Rails), a programmer (Linus Torvalds -> C), a company (Google -> Python), or a library (Boost -> C++), there is always a force behind adoption. Most languages undergo a "fad period", where it's hip and cool to write in it and people just do it because other people do it. Clojure is going through this righ…
This reddit post tells me why Haskell isn't that popular.
http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/cs54i/how_would_you...
Writing a quick directory traversal function should be a no-brainer in any reasonably general-purpose language. The fact that the above reddit thread is jam-packed with the ins-and-outs of doing this simple task in Haskell tells me that Haskell may be great for some things, but it's probably not general-purpose, or a great fit for anything close to the heavy I/O, streaming, processing sorts of code I write.
I actually own Real World Haskell, and have tried off and on to get into it, but I found that Clojure 'took' in my brain 1000x more easily than Haskell. It's a real bitch, because I'd love to be able to say I can write Haskell, but gosh-darn it, I just can't. Grrr. Sigh.
quick edit: in answer to your point about a 'killer app' for Haskell, the parsec parser-combinator library looks bloody brilliant. Maybe if I run across a parsing need, maybe it'll help me get something useful out of Haskell, but I suspect my brain just doesn't get on with the Haskelly/MLy languages.
Re: Why isn't Haskell popular in industry?
#9Failing to work on Windows is a much bigger problem than I think most people realize. You can write Java on Windows and (mostly) have it run on Linux or Solaris with no problem. And Windows has a 95%+ share in the corporate OS market. Ruby on Rails has a similar problem (though it's got better on Windows recently), and so does Django, which is a nightmare to get working in a Windows environment.
Re: Why isn't Haskell popular in industry?
#10Every language has a catalyst that pushes it from obscurity into mainstream use. Whether it be a project (Ruby on Rails), a programmer (Linus Torvalds -> C), a company (Google -> Python), or a library (Boost -> C++), there is always a force behind adoption. Most languages undergo a "fad period", where it's hip and cool to write in it and people just do it because other people do it. Clojure is going through this righ…
To expand on this, and on the OP, one thing that you need after the force is momentum.
I strongly feel that if Ruby was just Rails, it would have petered out by now (maybe people might have even gone back to Perl and CPAN). I think that GitHub may well be the driving force behind Ruby at this point. GitHub gems are pretty decent, but like the OP points out, Haskell packages aren't.