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Why isn't Haskell popular in industry?

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Re: Why isn't Haskell popular in industry?

#11

Post by tjr »

nvoorhies wrote: post #4
theli0nheart wrote: post #2

Every 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.

I am similarly puzzled at the implication that C++ was obscure prior to Boost, given that C++ was pretty well entrenched in both industry and academia by the time work on Boost began in 1998.

Re: Why isn't Haskell popular in industry?

#12

Post by Lewisham »

seldo wrote: post #9

Failing 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.

I'm not sure that these are really the same market share segments. Django, Rails and all that server side stuff is best run on servers, which more often than not, are going to be running a *nix.

Windows has C# and all that, and it works nicely for them.

Perhaps this leads to a wider question of who the Haskell audience really is and what problems they think they solve. Lots of languages have pigeon-holes, Ruby has its super dynamism, Python is an excellent scripting environment, C is fast, etc etc. Haskell is... mathsy. Mathsy applications already have Matlab and such.

I think at the end of the day, Haskell will probably remain a language from which other languages learn from, and that's OK, and that doesn't mean it's unimportant (I think even SPJ has said similar).

Re: Why isn't Haskell popular in industry?

#14

Post by dandrews »

theli0nheart wrote: post #5
nvoorhies wrote: post #4

Earlier 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.

Let's not fixate on the examples, folks. Perhaps they're arguable, but the original point is still valid: languages gain traction through prominent projects.

Re: Why isn't Haskell popular in industry?

#15

Post by d0m »

cmars232 wrote: post #13
d0m wrote: post #7

Even thought I don't agree on this argument, I would add: - Because it's not OO.

Why doesn't Haskell support objects? Seems like that would be quite useful. They don't need to be mutable or anything. They could be like records, that scale.

Because there is already support for "records" as you say. Add the static type "interface" and you get a kind-of OO.

Re: Why isn't Haskell popular in industry?

#16

Post by silentbicycle »

dandrews wrote: post #14
theli0nheart wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Let's not fixate on the examples, folks. Perhaps they're arguable, but the original point is still valid: languages gain traction through prominent projects.

Right, and C was an obscure reddit in-joke until Linux came along and gave it an air of legitimacy.

Re: Why isn't Haskell popular in industry?

#17

Post by nex3 »

Lewisham wrote: post #10
theli0nheart wrote: post #2

Every 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.

GitHub no longer builds or serves gems.

Re: Why isn't Haskell popular in industry?

#18

Post by silentbicycle »

cmars232 wrote: post #13
d0m wrote: post #7

Even thought I don't agree on this argument, I would add: - Because it's not OO.

Why doesn't Haskell support objects? Seems like that would be quite useful. They don't need to be mutable or anything. They could be like records, that scale.

Because it has typeclasses, which solve the same problems without creating the new problems that conventional objects do.

Why doesn't Java support pattern matching?

Re: Why isn't Haskell popular in industry?

#19

Post by Lewisham »

nex3 wrote: post #17
Lewisham wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

GitHub no longer builds or serves gems.

Well, what I mean is they're developed on GitHub, then released to RubyGems.
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