Ask Reddit: What is Haskell good for?
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It's been a learning experience all around. Interesting things have happened and are happening. Not quite ready to call it "practical" but it sure is interesting.
IMHO, the most interesting confluence to date is a relatively practical Software Transactional Memory. There's a lot of good Haskell concurrency but it says something that for STM to really, really work, you pretty much seem to need Haskell. (It is a characteristic of STM that once you allow even a relatively small escape hatch, the guarantees it provides go flying out the window and it explodes in complexity beyond usefulness.) I'm still not sure exactly what this says, but I'm having fun learning. And note I'm not saying I even necessarily use STM all the time; I specifically find interesting the idea that it doesn't seem to work anywhere else because the temptation to impurity is too strong and it's the impurity that causes the complexity detonation; it's a good exemplar of the sort of interesting things going on, not the only such thing.
It may be the most genuinely innovative area of programming research going on right now. Most other communities seem to just be shuffling the same ideas around over and over again. (Or are so straight-up academic as to be impractically useless with no real chance of escaping that designation.) That does mean it is still full of rather sharp pointy bits, whereas even a brand new Algol-derived language now has so many decades of experience behind it that even its warts can start out well-polished. If Haskell does intrigue you, you should probably be aware that even though there are ten calendar years of Haskell history it still feels rather like a promising three-year-old language, with things like large library gaps, distressing amounts of "best practices" living in oral history and obscure mailing list posts, and some questions about "how I do this" not really having good answers. But it's improving.
Haskell is one of the best tools available when you absolutely have to get programs correct. Companies like Galois[1] for example are big Haskell users. I think it's very practical.
Haskell has also renewed interest in a branch of mathematics, category theory, that has helped understand problems in mathematical foundations and recently even physics.
Also, not to quibble, but I think it's been around since the late 80s. I can check my library but I believe the original report (I have a hard copy) was issued on April fools day.
Not only is it a real-world Haskell project, it's the only one I can think of where the co-founders are from the UK and...Nebraska!
Reading "Real World Haskell" makes me understand why Haskell is such a great language, and while it may take me a bit longer to learn it, it will be well worth the effort.