
Running a Startup on Haskell - puredanger
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Running-a-Startup-on-Haskell
======
JoshTriplett
For anyone who'd prefer a direct video link rather than the infoq flash
player: [http://d1snlc0orfrhj.cloudfront.net/presentations/11-sep-
run...](http://d1snlc0orfrhj.cloudfront.net/presentations/11-sep-
runningastartuponhaskell.mp4)

(Retrieved by setting my User-Agent to that of an iPad, which causes infoq to
serve up a <video> tag.)

~~~
jamesbritt
Thanks for the link, and for the hack. That's quite handy.

------
antipax
Haskell web frameworks are maturing rapidly and the language is a joy to work
in, once you learn how to approach problems in it. Haskell has probably not
reached the peak of it's popularity yet (and frankly it's overdue for some
mainstream love).

~~~
viscanti
I think Haskell (and functional languages in general) will become increasingly
popular as it is (they are) a powerful way to deal with concurrency and can
easily take advantage of multiple processors. Languages are tools in a
developers toolbox, and Haskell turns out to be a powerful one for several
growing problems.

~~~
danieldk
It's not just that. Haskell has exceptionally strong typing and containment of
mutable computations, making it much easier to write correct programs. When a
module compiles, it's usually pretty bug-free.

~~~
chancho
Space leaks, stack overflows (foldl vs. foldl'), failed pattern matches (head
[]), etc. There are tons of bugs lurking in well-formed Haskell programs.

~~~
nightski
Tons being a vast overstatement. I mean, you could exploit these things to
cause bugs, but really do you encounter them on a day to day basis? I know I
rarely if ever have.

------
jsdalton
Does Haskell offer any tangible, practical advantages or benefits over other
languages in the context of a web framework, aside from just "if you prefer a
functional style of programming and you're working on a web project, here's a
way to do it"?

I'd love for somebody to convince me why a Haskell approach to web frameworks
is superior to Python/PHP/Ruby/JS beyond the usual "it's a matter of taste"
argument.

~~~
jamwt
Haskell's advantages (and disadvantages) as a Web Framework are generally the
same as in any other application domain: performance, concurrency, and
correctness.

~~~
zura
While I agree regarding correctness and concurrency, I wouldn't emphasize
performance, even for Java and .NET, whose GCs are more developed, tuned and
tested in the production environment than Haskell's one.

Edit: And for Haskell, achieving needed performance can be quite tricky with
regard to its laziness.

~~~
danieldk
_Edit: And for Haskell, achieving needed performance can be quite tricky with
regard to its laziness._

But Snap is driven by enumerators/iteratees (via the enumerator package),
which make it much easier to do fast near-constant space IO.

I have built a web application that uses Snap to query large (parse)
treebanks, and it was easy to make it performant.

------
looser
I only read the slides, but at one point the author mentions that they've
built an hybrid app using (Haskell + C#).

Next, the author mentions about several limitations that C# has and that
Haskell has a much better approach.

So, why use C#? Why not only use Haskell?

~~~
taudelta
He mentions that later on during the Q&A session

~~~
tome
Could you please repeat it here so we don't have to search? Thanks.

~~~
dan00
Their application is an extension of Outlook, which only has a dot.net API.

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tome
I wonder why they didn't use F#.

~~~
jamwt
He answered that too: language maturity. He was unfamiliar with the .NET
ecosystem in general, and the availability of help/expertise/examples etc was
much greater for C# than F#.

------
crasshopper
So no-one has built a QuickCheck for Ruby or Python?

I'd like to use this "property-based testing" he stressed.

~~~
fl3x
There are plenty of implementations linked from
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickCheck>. (I'm not sure in what state they
are though.)

------
dustingetz
anyone watch this yet? worth the 50 minutes? is there a transcript?

~~~
rednaught
If you're interested in Haskell then yes it is a good presentation. In my
opinion, Bryan is one of the more thoughtful speakers around.

Slides are here: [http://bos.github.com/strange-
loop-2011/talk/talk.html#%281%...](http://bos.github.com/strange-
loop-2011/talk/talk.html#%281%29)

Navigation uses keyboard arrows.

He had a similar/same talk about a month prior and here is the video on Vimeo
if you're not a fan of InfoQ's format:

<http://vimeo.com/27192476> (Bryan O'Sullivan - Building Solid Distributed
Applications with Haskell and Riak)

------
Unboxed
Terrific video! Thank you very much for posting! UP!

