seddona

Very useful feature. KiCAD is rapidly becoming feasible for use in a professional setting.

To your original point. Broadly I would say Europe creates enormous value. Which is then captured by the US. DeepMind being a good example.

AI = DeepMind

Cypto = Switzerland basically the home of crypto if it has one

VR = Improbable. Multi $B from softbank

Robots = Europe is far ahead of the US in robotics, ABB / Universal robotics etc.

Our startup runs on Haskell. I was worried about this initially but in practice finding great Haskell developers has been no more or less difficult than finding great developers in general.

Looks really useful, looking forward to checking out the NS integration.

I'm a longtime Ubuntu user and recently gave NixOS a try as most of our team use it. I have to admit I was highly skeptical as it all looks very complicated. The learning curve was a bit steep due to the documentation and odd terminology. But after you get going it solves so many problems. The fact you can declare you're entire desired set up in a single configuration.nix then "nixos-rebuild switch" and you're done saves so much time.

We use Nix for all our developer tooling at CircuitHub. It's not the easiest thing to get into - but once you do - it solves so many problems! Great to see a large company like Shopify get in on this.

Here's a good selection of research papers https://www.bioshumanlight.com/research/ . It seems like there might be some adverse effect due to the peak at the lower end of the blue spectrum. I'm waiting for the BIOS team to do a consumer product.

CircuitHub (a company I co-founded) and Habito (UK mortgage broker) stand out in my head as startups (in the PG sense of the word http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html) that use primarily Haskell and have direct startup competition using more conventional stacks.

We come across tons of others, I keep meaning to write down a list.

That would be an interesting question to answer. I know of a few rapidly growing companies using Haskell that compete directly with non-Haskell companies. We'll have to see how things play out over the next few years but that might provide some data points.

I have not used directly but this does look like a very impressive project.

We definitely could have built our product using more mainstream languages. I wouldn't, however, say we required a team of wizards, just good developers that prefer to work in Haskell if possible.

I don't see any claim in that article about everything being subjective, it's very specifically about programming languages.

I would argue that programming languages are subjective. There are many different equally viable ways to model the world and programmers should pick the one that aligns with how their brain works.

I'm not convinced it's possible to objectively rank programming languages from best to worse. They are not fundamental properties of the universe simply mental models devised by humans for humans.

I think this is an important point actually.

Programming languages (at least in the context being discussed) are just a means to model a problem domain. Some people find it easier to model domains in strongly typed functional languages but at a much larger percentage do not. Let's for argument's sake say it's 1% of all programmers. That is still a huge number of people though.

Maybe try contributing to a large Haskell codebase first to get a feel for what Haskell is like in in-the-large and gain some comfort.

I'll add this problem is not at all Haskell specific. If you put an experienced Java developer to work architecting a large Python application where they have no prior Python experience you are going to experience similar problems. I'd say the problem is perhaps a bit more acute with Haskell as the paradigm is likely more different to the prior language. So if possible get at least one person on your team that has experience with a large Haskell app and pair them up with other devs.

As a counterpoint - at CircuitHub, we migrated from NodeJS / Angular to Haskell / Elm and couldn't be happier.

I think a core reason for our success is that we built our team from experienced developers that had built large applications in other languages. Then arrived at Haskell as a better solution.

I have heard some negative experiences that I would attribute to a few different factors.

1. Lack of Haskell experience in the early team. 2. Lack of experience building large real-world applications (too academic) 3. The startup/group didn't achieve product-market fit, and Haskell was scapegoated.

None of these problems are Haskell specific, just run of the mill team issues.

Anybody got experience in UK vs Estonia? I have lived and run companies in the UK and USA. The UK is light years ahead of the US in terms of all online interactions with the government. It's also been a long time since I have done any paper-based interaction with the government in the UK, the online systems have been really good for years.

Curious how it compares to Estonia.

100k+ at CircuitHub

We are a YC company doing very well, all our back end code is written in Haskell. We have produced a lot of functionality with a relatively small team. I would say we are existence proof that Haskell is good for business.

Many companies rely on Elm now it’s definitely production ready.

We have a 100 kloc Elm application and the upgrade process was quick. Tracking Elm releases is considerably easier than the JavaScript ecosystem.

We have a large Elm app and do the occasional bit of JS interop when required, it's not a problem at all.

The 0.19 change simply limited the ability to publish packages containing interop to the official Elm package repository. You can still host your own packages etc.

Very useful content and perspective. I was certain it was all building to the conclusion you should hire the author's growth agency to get that 2x conversion gain and then leave the funnel alone, but the ask never came!

Thanks for the bug report, I'll let the dev team know!

I wouldn't consider that a problem with Elm it's just that our users are mostly on desktop Chrome so we don't test very often on mobile Safari.

Yep we build CircuitHub (YC startup) on Elm. I know quite a few companies that also have large Elm code bases.

Haskell seems like the perfect fit for this particular problem.

same here

Anecdotal evidence and mass media will lead you astray, best to look at the numbers. VC investment in the UK since Brexit is ~$2.5B, about 2x that of Germany and 3x France.

Every single person I know that voted leave did it on economic grounds. I'm sure a proportion was flat out racism but it's nowhere near 50%.

I appreciate the effort that went into making this but the startup ecosystem ranking is nonsense.

Berlin - 2? Beijing - 26?

I'd like to be constructive but it appears to just be randomized.