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Comment by akhilcacharya | Hacker News Reader

My biggest problem with pure FP languages is a lack of interesting projects - anyone have a good one that isn't a parser?

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Here are some:

https://github.com/facebook/Haxl - A Haskell library that simplifies access to remote data, such as databases or web-based services.

https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck - ShellCheck, a static analysis tool for shell scripts

https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger - The hledger command-line and web-based accounting tool, a Haskell rewrite of ledger.

https://github.com/facebook/flow - Adds static typing to JavaScript to improve developer productivity and code quality.

https://github.com/coq/coq - Coq is a formal proof management system. It provides a formal language to write mathematical definitions, executable algorithms and theorems together with an environment for semi-interactive development of machine-checked proofs.

Coq is a theorem prover and library that is written in ML (OCaml), so it is definitely not Haskell.

It is interesting that most (interactive) proof systems (e.g. Isabelle and Coq) are written in ML, I think it is probably historical. AFAIK most theorem proving research is done in Europe and ML has always been more popular there (however it seems to change in recent years, and FP courses switch to Haskell - however my school e.g. switched from OCaml to Haskell to OCaml in their FP course).

OP said:

> My biggest problem with pure FP languages is a lack of interesting projects

The list included projected written in pure FP languages.

Not only COQ, Flow is also written in OCaml.

You are right my mistake. However it seems to me that the Haskell community lays more emphasis on purity and the OCaml community takes a more pragmatic approach - but this distinction may be superficial for practical concerns.

You can do any kind of project with Haskell; I suspect you aren't looking very hard.

Here are some interesting starting points:

https://wiki.haskell.org/Game_Development#Videos

Any kind of project you would do in any other language :) My two favourite are either:

- an IRC bot (will get you into threading, network programming etc) or a;

- CMS starting with just basic blog functionality (i.e. authentication, talking to database to store posts etc)

The first can usually be done with just the standard libraries or at least some of the smaller ones, and the latter will get you into web programming and usually involve bigger frameworks, such as Yesod (what I'd go with), Snap, Servant etc.

Also, both of those types of projects are pretty well covered tutorial-wise.

The backend for https://circuithub.com/ is mostly Haskell. We are a YC startup.

I know a bunch of startups building in Haskell, it's just not that obvious from a google search.

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