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After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell

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Re: After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell

#31

Post by jasim »

em-bee wrote: post #19
jasim wrote: post #11

I'm curious about the choice of Python, rather than TypeScript. I find Ruby a very beautiful language, and Rails is an excellent web framework, but I need typed functions, record types and sum types. They help not just with correctness, but also as living documentation that lets me understand AI generated code. TypeScript provides discriminated union, but not exhaustive pattern-matching, and its syntax is a bit verbo…

python has optional types too now. if you could get the LLM to produce typed python would it be any worse than typescript?

I hadn't considered that, you are right. Though I would still prefer TS because the language is all about types; the entire ecosystem is well-typed and the type system is quite powerful (I do enjoy an occasional Omit and Pick). But it is a personal choice; as long as LLMs can generate well-typed Python, then for people who like the language it makes sense. However from the article, I got the sense that they went completely dynamic.

Re: After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell

#32

Post by mjr00 »

koito17 wrote: post #17
noelwelsh wrote: post #2

Wow. Not a Haskell user, but a big user of other languages with expressive type systems (mostly Scala; some Rust). My experience is the complete opposite. I can't imagine using a language without a good type system to catch all the junk the LLM produces. In fact I thought people would move away from languages from poor type systems, like Python, given the cost of using languages with expressive type systems has decre…

Recently had to touch a Python project at work. Just setting up the editor needed me to use 2-3 tools out of: pyright, basedpyright, ruff, ty, mypy, and possibly other tools I'm forgetting that kind of do the same thing but throw errors in different parts of the codebase. Also, for some reason Optional[T] became deprecated, just as the ecosystem finally embraced types ~3 years ago. In fact, one my company's greenfiel…

> Also, for some reason Optional[T] became deprecated, just as the ecosystem finally embraced types ~3 years ago.

Optional[T] is now T | None. Means exactly the same thing but doesn't require an import. Support for the older syntax presumably won't be removed for a long while regardless.

Re: After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell

#33

Post by cosmic_quanta »

For what it's worth, I've been using Haskell in production at Bitnomial, a financial exchange, and LLMs + Haskell is an extremely productive combo.

Since Opus 4.6, LLMs have been pretty clever at using fancy types with libraries like Servant and Beam. The expressiveness of the types, combined with feedback from the compiler, means that agents converge quickly to something that works. I don't think I've noticed agents having to run the compiler so often that compilation speed is an issue.

Re: After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell

#34

Post by ErroneousBosh »

noelwelsh wrote: post #2

Wow. Not a Haskell user, but a big user of other languages with expressive type systems (mostly Scala; some Rust). My experience is the complete opposite. I can't imagine using a language without a good type system to catch all the junk the LLM produces. In fact I thought people would move away from languages from poor type systems, like Python, given the cost of using languages with expressive type systems has decre…

> I can't imagine using a language without a good type system to catch all the junk the LLM produces

One approach would be to not use LLMs.

Re: After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell

#35

Post by domenkozar »

em-bee wrote: post #22
domenkozar wrote: post #20

We at Cachix have also moved on from Haskell about two years ago and I'm sure someone is going to make a comeback with a language that takes the lessons from it but starts from skratch. We need more general purpose Elm languages in the space.

what did you move to, and why?

Rust, mostly because:

- haskell exceptions and laziness are devastating for production

- too small ecosystem, had to write 10+ SDKs (now with AI that's less of an issue)

- haskell ecosystem is too fragmented due to prima donna prevalence

Re: After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell

#36

Post by jimbokun »

noelwelsh wrote: post #2

Wow. Not a Haskell user, but a big user of other languages with expressive type systems (mostly Scala; some Rust). My experience is the complete opposite. I can't imagine using a language without a good type system to catch all the junk the LLM produces. In fact I thought people would move away from languages from poor type systems, like Python, given the cost of using languages with expressive type systems has decre…

You should read the article before replying.

Re: After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell

#37

Post by jimbokun »

muragekibicho wrote: post #3

I'm not trying to be reductive but the article's a lot of words for "We're vibecoding our app now and the glorious (almost almighty) Haskell compiler is too slow for the agent to iterate it's mistakes until it gets it right."

Maybe overly verbose but makes an important point.

Slow compile times should have been a deal breaker for how they impacted human coders. LLM coding just makes the problem more stark.

Re: After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell

#39

Post by jimbokun »

lp4v4n wrote: post #16

I'm not a Haskell developer and I hadn't heard of this company "Scarf" before. As much as I respect this guy who tried to work and push an alternative ecosystem, it's hard for me to shake off the impression that, rather than due to Haskell compile time, he moved to python because it's easier to find developers for it and it's the de facto scripting language for LLMs. No problem about that, of course. Running a compan…

How the hell would you know his true intentions?

Fast compile times is one of the most important qualities for developer productivity. It made Haskell a non-starter for many developers even before LLM driven development took off.

Re: After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell

#40

Post by mpweiher »

noelwelsh wrote: post #2

Wow. Not a Haskell user, but a big user of other languages with expressive type systems (mostly Scala; some Rust). My experience is the complete opposite. I can't imagine using a language without a good type system to catch all the junk the LLM produces. In fact I thought people would move away from languages from poor type systems, like Python, given the cost of using languages with expressive type systems has decre…

TFA:

The type safety we gave up hasn’t been noticeable in any concrete way yet, especially considering our test coverage has never been better.

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