

Haskell powered companies  - learc83
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_industry

======
dtbx
It never occurs to me that a company could be "powered" by Haskell.

In my old job, I used haskell for everything from satellital image analysis to
the web frontend, but I didn't tell anyone. Specially I didn't tell my bosses.

When they discovered my functional tendencies, they were upset and worried.
They feel betrayed, but it was too late. The company was an "haskell powered
company".

I give them an edge over the other companies in the field, but when I leave,
they were orphaned and unable to hire a new Haskell programmer (I live in
Chile, a very imperative nation).

Too bad for them, but for me, it was "pure" functional fun.

~~~
i386
Too bad for them? Incredible. That's not a very professional attitude to have.
You shouldn't choose technologies you like because as a developer it's your
job to choose technologies that are right for the business.

~~~
dtbx
Certainly, I couldn't have done what I did without Haskell, or with more
traditional languages, like C++.

The most challenging task I've done with Haskell, was to find the right
combination of parameters in orden to sum an array of satellital images,
preserving a set of constrains. I couldn't have dreamed of doing that without
Haskell. It was the right choice for the job.

When they discovered the tools I've used, they recognized the problem, but
they treated me bad, so I search for another job.

~~~
enigmo
The right tool for the job is one that will be supported by other developers
after you leave.

~~~
dtbx
The right tool for the job is anything that gives you the power to get shit
done.

Maintainability is secondary if you can't do the job in the first place. Think
about it.

I think that using Haskell in the industry is somewhat irresponsible if you
live in a third world nation like Chile. You can't find haskell hackers here!
You create maintainability problems!

It is clearly not my fault to be intelligent, know some haskell and live in
Chile. Can you blame me?

~~~
enigmo
That doesn't sound like a very good way to build a sustainable business.

------
exDM69
At nvidia, we have a handful of in-house tools that are written in Haskell. My
manager is a huge Haskell fan and he satisfies his coding itch by writing some
tools with it.

The tools we have are quite simple, like running a set of automated tests on a
Tegra device and then upload results (pass/fail, code coverage, memory leak
stats, etc) to a web interface.

We've had a few Haskell coding nights where I and my boss have been teaching
our teammates some Haskell skills. We have about half a dozen coders (out of
~50 at our office) who can do enough Haskell to get shit done.

~~~
apk17
That's cool; but what is the point of haskell there? It sounds like you'd just
as well could use, say, ruby; what does the specific feature set of haskell
help here? (Apart from it being somewhat hard to actually write fortran code
in haskell. :-)

~~~
djhworld
Type safety would be the main plus point for me, even for tools and scripts.

Plus I guess some people just prefer functional programming when they can and
Haskell offers that in abundance. I guess the downside is the less portable
nature of the code (this is where Clojure et al. would probably win...although
writing command line tools and scripts in a JVM language still has a long way
to go IMO)

~~~
exDM69
Actually, Haskell libraries were perhaps more important than any individual
language feature. The language allows such good abstractions that libraries
like Parsec or Haskell XML toolkit are very nice to use.

------
ams6110
_Hustler Turf Equipment Hesston, Kansas ... Designs, builds, and sells lawn
mowers._

Wow... I mean talk about the LAST company you would think would be using a
language like Haskell. I would have more likely pictured some horrible
VB6-Access mess. Just goes to show you what the risks are in assuming...

~~~
mark_h
Is that where John Goerzen (of <http://book.realworldhaskell.org/>) works? I
watched Bryan O'Sullivan's CUFP keynote the other night,
<http://cufp.org/videos/keynote-real-world-haskell>, and he mentioned that
John was working at a tractor company in Kansas or something along those
lines!

~~~
sanxiyn
Yes, it is where John Goerzen works.

~~~
mark_h
Cool, thanks.

------
five18pm
I thought the link would be of companies that use Haskell as their primary
language of development, but it is more of companies which use/had used
Haskell in one of their projects. The former would be interesting to know, if
indeed such companies exist.

~~~
sseveran
Haskell has much more of a group inside of a company will use it as their
primary environment then adopting it wholesale. Haskell is used extensively in
trading with almost every major bank and hedge fund using it, although no one
talks about it. It is also extensively used in energy companies.

There are a few companies out there that use it as their primary language such
as Tsuru Capital and my company, Alpha Heavy Industries. By definition
companies using it as their primary language will be smaller companies.
Standard Chartered has a very large Haskell group.

~~~
raverbashing
Which energy companies and for what?

The major problem with the 'smaller languages' is that sometimes, even if you
want to, and can use it effectively, it's difficult to interface with other
systems.

For example, services using SOAP. Drivers to DBs and other systems.

Sometimes it's easier to have your core login in Haskell for example, then
make it interface with something else in Java/C#/etc which will have plugins
for everything.

~~~
gaius
_Drivers to DBs_

I found this with OCaml too, so I decided to do something about it:
<http://gaiustech.github.com/ociml/>

------
Symmetry
That list is much longer than it used to be.

~~~
nullspace
That's good. I look forward to a time when Haskell will be a relevant point on
my resume.

~~~
carterschonwald
why isn't it a relevant point on your resume? :)

~~~
carterschonwald
Point in fact, of the (several) really great folks who reached out to me from
this months hiring thread, the only fellow I'm starting to collaborate with
right now (rather than a few months out) has a few cute haskell Libs on
hackage. And By collaborate mean a semi/Demi/ maybe even full cofounder piece
:-)

Here's the kicker about Haskell code (and many other functional langs): it's
very easy to evaluate the work for quality engineering and whether or not
there's some real ingenuity in it, beyond just the algorithmic pieces and the
overall architecture diagram. Or at least I shall make that claim.

------
jcromartie
The first one I clicked on was dead... the procedural city generation one
(<http://gamr7.com/>) :(

------
evanlong
You know I bet <http://girlloveshaskell.com/> knows all about these places.

~~~
nandemo
I asked her out once. She blew me off saying I was "too eager" and "not her
type".

------
cadr
Which of these are in the bay area? Bump/Facebook/Google - what else?

~~~
hkmurakami
Lucent is off of highway 237.

Ericsson has a few buildings on 237 (near Marvell / Brocade) but somehow I
doubt that the Haskell group is located here.

------
edwinnathaniel
"Clojure powered startup" post was an hour before this.

Jealous?

 _run away_

------
shellox
What are the arguments for using Haskell over Ruby? For which purposes fit
Haskell better?

~~~
djhworld
<http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Why_Haskell_matters>

~~~
shellox
thanks, should have looked up this source..

------
sidcool1234
Isn't this an old post?

~~~
switz
Just because something wasn't posted in the last day does not mean it doesn't
have relevant information.

