

Building a business with Haskell: Case Studies: Cryptol, HaLVM and Copilot - dons
http://corp.galois.com/blog/2010/12/10/building-a-business-with-haskell-case-studies-cryptol-halvm-1.html

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grav1tas
Galois makes some pretty cool stuff, and it's full of smart people. Buzzing
through the slides I felt like it wasn't so much the case that Haskell was
essential for building a business, but rather it was the right tool for the
kinds of things Galois was looking to build, or maybe Galois picked doing
those things because it was really good at Haskell (it is) and it just carried
out a "hammer looking for nails" situation. I write in Haskell, yes, but I
typically use it for specific things I'm trying to do (languages research,
writing parsers, evaluating funky theoretical stuff). I'm not to keen to the
idea of writing web pages in Haskell (<3's Rails) for example, or generally
trying to shoehorn it into something that I would use C or Java for. The
mental overhead just isn't there with the other language, especially for small
projects where thinking of doing something with Monads would take me longer
than just writing the thing in C and debugging it.

That being said, I think Haskell is an amazing language for what it's worth,
and it's a great way for other language designers to see how many theoretical
language features can be worked into a real life industry-grade language.
Also, it's good for learning just because it's so different from everything
else and can give you perspective on your programming.

