It's really aggravating that HN goes against it's own culture so thoroughly when it comes to Haskell. We're supposed to comment on what TFA says, not lick our wounds about how Haskell wasn't what we wanted it to be. f you can't contribute to the thrust of TFA how about creating space to listen to people who actually know what they're talking about?
Every single piece of hackneyed received wisdom and FUD in here can be easily countered if you talk to somebody with actual production Haskell experience. Speaking for myself:
- I run a startup that has production applications making money for 4 years now written entirely in Haskell with 6 devs doing nothing but Haskell (as well as engineers working in JS and our own language, Pact, yes, written in Haskell).
- When we need more bandwidth, we work with an all-Haskell consultancy that itself has no trouble finding work and is very successful in their own right.
- Before that, I built a group at a major bank writing Haskell code and getting it out in production, and outperforming Java apps.
- The tired "eww static types aren't for real business" is opinions masquerading as "facts". If you are a half-decent engineer in ANY language you can make your code refactorable for changing requirements. Whining that types makes that harder just shows your own limitations. Any decent programmer working in a strongly-typed system leverages types to make code _more_ refactorable in _less_ time with _fewer_ bugs. But hey these are just our anecdata too. Here's what I'm not doing: spreading FUD about Python or Clojure or JS, I'm too busy loving what I do.
- From a hiring perspective, Haskell programmers as a group offer an immense strategic advantage, and it's mainly _because_ they had to learn Haskell on the weekend and it wasn't handed to them. That shows passion and grit. I've built two teams from scratch now in totally different circumstances and it is simply breezy to find a wide variety of experience levels to craft a team from; they are by far the best teams I have ever worked with, with zero duds. The community is strong and excellent and helps each other out as far as job hunting goes.
Don't blame Haskell if it didn't stick, don't hate on Haskell if you find it intimidating or pointless. If anything, you should be grateful that there is a language that is actually different enough to attract a different kind of programmer, lord knows it's why I'm here: after having jobs in Java, C++, Perl, Ruby, JS, Visual Basic, Hypercard, you name it, it was nice to see that there's a different way to do things. It's really fun, there's always more to learn (not true of every language btw), and finally, it kicks serious ass on the performance side (as GC/runtime languages go).