On 17/04/2012 01:44 PM, scott wrote:
>> It's when I see things like this that I'm glad I use Haskell, not some
>> low-level performance-oriented language that doesn't mind giving you
>> garbage results if it makes the code 0.02% faster...
>
> Has Haskell ever been used for something where the execution speed is
> actually important? :-)

Well... The Haskell compiler itself. The Darcs source control system. 
Several web frameworks / web servers. (If you believe the hype, some of 
these web servers rival Apache in terms of performance.)

If there's one thing Haskell lacks, it's a "killer application". There's 
nothing I can really point at which demonstrates either the speed or 
usefulness of Haskell. The best I can do is some microbenchmarks on the 
language shootout.

> If Haskell had a decent IDE and easy documented access to the rest of
> the system I might consider using it. But then F# exists already and I
> haven't paid much attention to that so far...

Haskell has /an/ IDE... I'm not sure it warrants the description of 
"decent" yet though. Last time I tried it, it had reached the stage of 
"kinda clunky, but basically usable".

http://antimatroid.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/leksah.png

If by "easy access to the rest of the system" you mean "it works great 
on POSIX systems", then yeah, sure. :-) Oh, wait, you meant Windows, the 
platform that 98% of the entire world uses? Sorry, no luck.

(OK, that's a slight exaggeration. The basic system works flawlessly on 
all popular platforms. But if you want to talk to the outside world, you 
end up needing to know very low level system calls.)

If you want /documentation/... then yeah, I see why you're not using 
Haskell.

In short, in terms of how nicely it's all packaged up, Haskell just 
can't compete with the might of Java or F# or Erlang or whatever. 
Haskell is a hobby project put together by a few dozen open-source 
developers from around the world. It's got nothing on Microsoft or 
Oracle or Ericsson.

> I think you need to be working with very specific types of problems to
> warrant using Haskell, which isn't to say nobody uses it.

What, you mean like programs involving complex data manipulations? 
Problems where you want to actually get the correct answer? Problems 
where you'd like to be able to still understand the code in two years' 
time? Because, to me, that sounds like a pretty /huge/ problem domain. ;-)

It's sad, really. You can use C or Java or whatever, which is horrible 
to code in but lets you actually get stuff done. Or you can code in 
Haskell, which is a joyful celebration of how programming should be, but 
then it's a nightmare to actually interact with the outside world... I 
keep hoping that some day this situation will be fixed. But I doubt it.

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