
Ask Reddit: What is Haskell good for? - yters
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2bxc1/ask_reddit_what_is_haskell_good_for
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jerf
Haskell is the academics coming out of the ivory tower to discover if their
theories work in the real world, being joined by some more academically-
inclined programmers trying to help them.

It's been a learning experience all around. Interesting things have happened
and are happening. Not quite ready to call it "practical" but it sure is
interesting.

IMHO, the most interesting confluence to date is a relatively practical
Software Transactional Memory. There's a lot of good Haskell concurrency but
it says something that for STM to really, really work, you pretty much seem to
need Haskell. (It is a characteristic of STM that once you allow even a
relatively small escape hatch, the guarantees it provides go flying out the
window and it explodes in complexity beyond usefulness.) I'm still not sure
exactly what this says, but I'm having fun learning. And note I'm not saying I
even necessarily use STM all the time; I specifically find interesting the
idea that it doesn't seem to work anywhere else because the temptation to
impurity is too strong and it's the impurity that causes the complexity
detonation; it's a good exemplar of the sort of interesting things going on,
not the only such thing.

It may be the most genuinely innovative area of programming research going on
right now. Most other communities seem to just be shuffling the same ideas
around over and over again. (Or are so straight-up academic as to be
impractically useless with no real chance of escaping that designation.) That
does mean it is still full of rather sharp pointy bits, whereas even a brand
new Algol-derived language now has so many decades of experience behind it
that even its warts can start out well-polished. If Haskell does intrigue you,
you should probably be aware that even though there are ten calendar years of
Haskell history it still feels rather like a promising three-year-old
language, with things like large library gaps, distressing amounts of "best
practices" living in oral history and obscure mailing list posts, and some
questions about "how I do this" not really having good answers. But it's
improving.

~~~
jamii
Thats the most accurate and balanced description of the haskell community I've
ever heard. Such honesty does more to convince people to check out haskell
than any amount of advocacy.

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winxordie
Turning programmers into mathematicians and mathematicians into programmers.

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wyclif
<http://xmonad.org/>

Not only is it a real-world Haskell project, it's the only one I can think of
where the co-founders are from the UK _and_...Nebraska!

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sgt
I'm considering doing a project in Haskell. I've used a functional language
before (Standard ML), but that was in university and I didn't really like it
much.

Reading "Real World Haskell" makes me understand why Haskell is such a great
language, and while it may take me a bit longer to learn it, it will be well
worth the effort.

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astine
Programming.

