Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016

haskellforall.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 67 posts

Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016

#21

Post by coolsunglasses »

xiphias wrote: post #18
coolsunglasses wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I'm a coauthor of the book mentioned in the State of the Union post. The beginner parts were _a_ gap, but they weren't the only gap. In fact, none of the existing books really went very far beyond Monad, with only RWH covering monad transformers. So, part of the appeal of the book isn't just that we cover beginner topics better, we cover _everything_ from beginner to intermediate/advanced that you're likely to ap…

I think the problem with Haskell is that you need to be on the advanced level to be able to write a web app. Every beginner PHP coder can throw a website together, it shouldn't be harder than that in a higher level language, but it still is.

Ah no, the more advanced frameworks have better marketing and more bling to offer. Scotty is quite usable for someone that knows the basics, much like Sinatra.

Our coverage is less based on hard necessity and more on "what are they likely to want to do". Haskell just isn't as flat as other language ecosystems. Tons of people exploring how to do things better but there's a perfectly pleasant, conservative core of libraries you can use.

Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016

#22

Post by dudul »

dexwiz wrote: post #2

Can someone explain to me why Haskell will ever be viable as a fullstack language? I have done a few toy projects in Haskell, and it has taught me some great functional programming concepts that I now apply to other languages. But, purely functional programming seems to work 90% the time, but the other 10% is so negative it invalidates the rest. Edit for clarification: Full Stack would be app server up. So runs a ser…

What is the 10% that is no negative? I've been using FP for 6 years now (not in Haskell though) and never looked back.

Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016

#23

Post by andruby »

tathougies wrote: post #17
dexwiz wrote: post #2

Can someone explain to me why Haskell will ever be viable as a fullstack language? I have done a few toy projects in Haskell, and it has taught me some great functional programming concepts that I now apply to other languages. But, purely functional programming seems to work 90% the time, but the other 10% is so negative it invalidates the rest. Edit for clarification: Full Stack would be app server up. So runs a ser…

I use Haskell exclusively on my SaaS app ( http://sostenoto.com ). The backend not only provides a simple REST API, but it also provides WebRTC signaling and a real-time graphical communications and presence protocol. Haskell makes it so easy to write correct concurrent code it's not even funny. GHC's magnificent IO manager means I can handle 1000s of connections on one amazon instance. Can't understand why you would…

Elixir is getting increasingly popular as a server-side language with Phoenix. It has great concurrency, futures (Tasks [0]), smp and a fast http server (cowboy [1]).

[0] http://elixir-lang.org/docs/v1.1/elixir/Task.html

[1] https://github.com/ninenines/cowboy

Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016

#24

Post by mark_l_watson »

I think that I own 7 Haskell books, and there are good parts in all of them. A few of them are great. Why all the love and strong recommendation for a new unpublished book?

I use Emacs, IntelliJ, and TextMate for Haskell. I love all three.

I thought the best part of this article was the coverage of libraries because I find myself to be uncertain of selecting the most appropriate ones. I use a small subset of Haskell but that works for me.

Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016

#26

Post by zeckalpha »

andruby wrote: post #23
tathougies wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Haskell exclusively on my SaaS app ( http://sostenoto.com ). The backend not only provides a simple REST API, but it also provides WebRTC signaling and a real-time graphical communications and presence protocol. Haskell makes it so easy to write correct concurrent code it's not even funny. GHC's magnificent IO manager means I can handle 1000s of connections on one amazon instance. Can't understand why you would…

Elixir is getting increasingly popular as a server-side language with Phoenix. It has great concurrency, futures (Tasks [0]), smp and a fast http server (cowboy [1]). [0] http://elixir-lang.org/docs/v1.1/elixir/Task.html [1] https://github.com/ninenines/cowboy

But limited static analysis.

Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016

#27

Post by emergentcypher »

dexwiz wrote: post #2

Can someone explain to me why Haskell will ever be viable as a fullstack language? I have done a few toy projects in Haskell, and it has taught me some great functional programming concepts that I now apply to other languages. But, purely functional programming seems to work 90% the time, but the other 10% is so negative it invalidates the rest. Edit for clarification: Full Stack would be app server up. So runs a ser…

Really? What is this 10%?

We're using Haskell for server-side programming at my work and it's been fantastic. Functional programming is so well suited for stateless web services.

Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016

#28

Post by johan_larson »

tathougies wrote: post #17
dexwiz wrote: post #2

Can someone explain to me why Haskell will ever be viable as a fullstack language? I have done a few toy projects in Haskell, and it has taught me some great functional programming concepts that I now apply to other languages. But, purely functional programming seems to work 90% the time, but the other 10% is so negative it invalidates the rest. Edit for clarification: Full Stack would be app server up. So runs a ser…

I use Haskell exclusively on my SaaS app ( http://sostenoto.com ). The backend not only provides a simple REST API, but it also provides WebRTC signaling and a real-time graphical communications and presence protocol. Haskell makes it so easy to write correct concurrent code it's not even funny. GHC's magnificent IO manager means I can handle 1000s of connections on one amazon instance. Can't understand why you would…

> Can't understand why you wouldn't be using Haskell for server-side web development.

I can't tell whether that's just a rhetorical flourish, so I'll answer straight.

To begin with, there are a couple of concerns that might kill an attempt to use Haskell.

1. I might not be able to get management approval. Haskell is an obscure language with a reputation for difficulty. The bosses might well say no. 2. I might need to work with an existing codebase in something like Java or Python. Not possible from Haskell.

If those don't kill the project, there's the cost-benefit tradeoff. On the benefits side: 1. Haskell code is very concise. (definitely) And greater concision means faster development. (possibly) 2. Haskell code is less likely to contain errors, because of very strict typing. (probably) 3. Haskell coders are disproportionately capable, because the language is obscure and difficult. (probably)

On the costs side: 1. I have much more experience in other languages. It would take at least a year, maybe two before I'd be up to pro standards in Haskell. 2. The community of Haskell programmers is small. It might be difficult to hire anyone if the project grew; I might be faced with training someone from scratch, not just in a new language, but in a new programming paradigm.

So, this isn't anything like a slam dunk. Quite the opposite, actually. There are a couple of issues that might nix the project right up front, and then a daunting cost-benefit calculation.

Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016

#29

Post by mark_l_watson »

etcinit wrote: post #16
melling wrote: post #3

It sounds like tooling has improved but it's still the biggest hurdle for beginners: "Improving IDE support is the single easiest way to lower the entry barrier to newcomers."

I think stack has helped in that area. As a beginner, I found stack's ability to create a new project from a template very useful when getting started with projects. The plugins for vim and Atom do a really good job for auto-completion and showing linter/compiler warnings, but they are a bit hard to setup initially.

+1 yes! The stack new project templates have saved me a lot of time. Stack, I'm general, is a great improvement in my device work flow.

Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016

#30

Post by tome »

fiatjaf wrote: post #25

I've tried many times to learn Haskell. The problem is always with setting up a compiler, getting packages, setting environment, not getting a ton of gigabytes of duplicated packages, getting useful vim support etc.

Have you tried stack? It was released about six months ago and has revolutionised Haskell's offering in this area.
Post reply on HN