Hacker News Reader

I've experienced those types of speed ups when doing "puzzler" programs in Haskell as opposed to Java (the language I make money programming in). If given a few weeks to implement a REST API or something much more real world, I'd kick Haskell to the curb and cleave to Java like a long lost lover. Libraries, tooling, community support and information...these are the language's "killer" features.

View on HN

I support this attitude!

Haskell is coming around though. We got Stack which is a fantastic package manager, and we now have a web API library which is pretty much unmatched: http://haskell-servant.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ (each Servant endpoint has a type, and you can generate docs and client libraries from your backend code). Editor tooling has historically been the other problem, but that's starting to come around too.

It's like Year of Linux on the Desktop. Every year it gets better, and some long-suffered pain point is solved. But every year the world moves on and users want more. Without a massive investment, it just can't keep up.

On OpenVMS, Flex's Ten15, and Ada w/ middleware, it was common to use their cross-language, development support to code pieces of apps or systems in whatever language suited them. Then they smoothly integrated with varying performance effects. One could write the parts absolutely needing Java community in Java, integrate a middleware like ZeroMQ, and write the rest in a better language. Other stuff could be gradually ported if necessary to better language. Automated if a simple program.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com