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Comment by moomin | Hacker News Reader

Application sweet spot is a funny thing, because it's mostly determined by the presence of specific libraries. What Haskell has more than anything is ridiculously general libraries. It's got perfectly good libraries for web development, Postgres access &access, but the only place I'd say it's got a real application-specific strength in libraries is parsing.

Weirdly, what Haskell is good at is generality. Which is much the same as for LISP.

I'd say the Haskell community remains academic/hobbyist, but that's not to say there aren't plenty of people doing Real Work in it.

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I agree that parsing libraries are probably the strongest part of the Haskell ecosystem for applications. The only time I've chosen Haskell for a serious application was because of its parsing libraries (specifically parsec): https://blogdown.io/.

"academic/hobbyist" probably doesn't give justice to the benefit those works provide for languages that implement experiments pioneered in i.e. haskell. I say "probably" because I can't give any exact examples.

This is really a specific example of the benefit academia generally provides to society being highly underappreciated.

Ok, so the generality like LISP/Scheme with a few basic productions/rules and some basic operations could be used to create/represent any levels of complexity. Something like Northhead & Russell's Principia Mathematica.

Yes, and that's why you're often scratching your head at the function definitions: they're extremely general solutions to general problems. This, in conjunction with the documentation issue means that often you end up getting referred to papers, which does nothing to help the "only for academics" impression.

It is a fair point that some libraries could benefit from some better soft documentation.

I think painting Haskell as a LISP but in a blank-slate world without packages is not quite accurate. There is a large library of existing packages that take you beyond the language's primitive constructions.

One of the main reasons Haskell isn't used more in production systems is the small pool of developers that can actually program in it.

It is a very good language once the type system makes sense and you can reliably reason about the lazy nature of it.

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