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Comment by bcheung | Hacker News Reader

For people using Haskell at work, how did it happen? I'm wanting to use it at work but there is a lot of pushback and I am encouraged to use languages like Go and Python.

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I was in the senior leadership team of a company a while back (I was brought on to build a software team from scratch). I worked with the other execs to ask the question "what culture do you want in your software development team; what will be compatible with the rest of the company culture?"

Some of the options we discussed...

- Is your plan to sell the company in a year or two? Then you will probably write a lot of throwaway code, and speed of development of basic stuff is most important. If you want this, I'll hire you a team of Python or NodeJS or Ruby programmers.

- Is your plan to have software that supports your company over the long term, but the goal of the software itself is more around cost savings? Is the software development team going to be a cost centre? If so, you will end up with a revolving door of programmers coming in for short periods of time to work on it? If you want this, I will hire a team of Java or Go or C# programmers.

- Do you want to build very technically complicated software as a differentiation strategy? Then you will be looking at a team of very smart software developers who love their craft with a passion that will be a bit foreign to non-technical staff. If you want this, I'll hire a team of Haskell / Lisp / Ocaml / F# programmers.

At the time, the rest of the leadership team wanted the last option, so that's the software team we built. As far as I remember it worked quite well, I remember that there was only one significant bug that made it into production.

I work for IOHK who use Haskell for a blockchain system called Cardano.

You can see the backgrounds of the Haskell team here - https://iohk.io/team/#cardano

I've found the one general thing is a strong academic background. I joined the Haskell team as a test engineer coming from several years in software engineering (Python and C#) to learn more about Haskell and Formal Methods. Unfortunately there aren't any jobs up at the moment so I can't show the reqs, however there's a compiler engineer role that requires Haskell. https://iohk.io/en/careers/fk03jlb/functional-compiler-engin...

I've used Haskell (more than trivially) at two positions where I was working for someone else.

The first time was at Uber, where a side project I had started in Haskell proved to be something we needed, so I spent a year building on top of that.

My second time was at LeapYear, whose stack was (and I believe still is) predominantly Haskell.

Both good experiences - happy to elaborate on either.

I used Haskell for about eighteen months on a contract, but the project had chosen Haskell before I was brought aboard. Haskell was used to implement a novel programming language with strong guarantees of security and data integrity implemented in the type system. The language was both statically and dynamically typed, with static types checked at compile time and dynamic types supported by tagged hardware (the tagged hardware was still under development when I was working on the project).

I think it's just not gonna fly in many organizations. You need the people who are going to be working with it and maintaining it to buy into it, and you also need to convince whoever is in charge of technology choices that it's a good idea. If you are the latter yourself, then that's half the problem solved.

It's probably easier to join an organization that is already positive towards it.

Start making a list of production incidents caused by bugs that aren't possible in Haskell. Even better if you can attach a monetary cost to any of them.

Find a small, relatively independent project and make the case to try it out.

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