Comment by MaxGabriel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MaxGabriel | Hacker News Reader

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I'm the CTO at Mercury (https://mercury.com/) and we have 100% of our backend written in Haskell. It's gone really well so far.

Answering another commenter's question, I would say the "secret weapons" are:

1. Hiring: Haskell is a very in-demand language by very good engineers. For a startup, it's absolutely amazing for recruiting and I can't overstate how important recruiting good people is for a startup.

2. Correctness: Haskell helps you ensure your code doesn't have bugs. For a bank this is fairly important. Some aspects of Haskell that are great for this: algebraic data types ("discriminated unions" in some languages) model business logic quite well, purity makes a function much more of a known quantity, libraries like Persistent ensure type-safe SQL queries, and in general the community cares about correctness.

I haven't used the other languages you mentioned, so I can't really speak to a comparison with them. Re: laziness, it's almost never something I think about in practice.

> 1. Hiring: Haskell is a very in-demand language by very good engineers. For a startup, it's absolutely amazing for recruiting and I can't overstate how important recruiting good people is for a startup.

Although for engineers, supply-and-demand favoring employers typically means it disfavors employees: you may effectively be taking a pay cut to use Haskell compared to more popular languages.

Sure, but those that are willing to because they're sufficiently excited about the language means you can have a higher confidence in your hires, since they, A. Know what Haskell is, B. Want to learn it, C. Are willing to take a pay cut to be able to get paid to learn/use it. Very high signal to noise I'd wager.

If you're a Java shop, you better be paying higher than market rate if you want to be able to attract good talent, but then you still have to figure out who they are amidst all the mediocre/poor devs, who are interested because of the higher comp. Very low signal to noise.

It seems like a less popular language, that has real business value, helps achieve the thing every company that isn't "hire fast, fire fast" tries to do with their hiring policy. It does mean you can't easily hire people who already know the language, so you have to consider the ramp up time, but I don't think that's nearly as painful as many hiring managers seem to think it is.

Well yeah, it seems you're reiterating that it's great for employers, not for employees. I don't disagree.

Of course if Haskell somehow takes off and all the FANG companies want to hire as many Haskell engineers as they can, then the situation would probably reverse.

I'm more calling out that it's mutually beneficial; the employees choosing that tradeoff are still choosing that tradeoff. The other tradeoff, work for a higher compensated position in a language that they hate, isn't objectively "better", just different.

You really think so? Take for example, kdb+/q. Not exactly widely used, but engineers who specialize it are making top dollar, it's not unusual for total comp to be around a million dollars, or sometimes a lot more, if you're the principle architect of a new system.

You're just saying that kdb has the opposite imbalance as Haskell (relative to mainstream languages).

If supply and demand for kdb favours employees, then presumably it disfavors employers, who would rather have a bigger pool of kdb programmers so they could pay less.

That doesn't contradict what I said about Haskell vs mainstream languages. I didn't say all niche languages are like Haskell.

The labor market is not zero-sum.

If Haskell is just a signal that selects for more competent people, companies will be happy to hire people whose competence they would have to invest a lot to match otherwise, and developers will be happy to get a larger salary than they would be able to get otherwise. (But yes, this would disfavor people with other kinds of signal.)

If it selects for high productivity people, or if it helps people be more productive, companies will be happy from getting more output than they would otherwise, and developers will still get more money.

The stereotype is that Haskell jobs pay less, and developers are happy to work with a better language. That still doesn't disfavor any party, but I don't think anybody has any evidence that this is the case. Notice that the GP is talking about people competence, not salary.

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