Now, every time you hire an engineer they need to spend weeks or months learning Haskell on top of everything else. It now costs the business an extra 50K every time you get a new developer.
I like Google's strategy of having the simplest language that anybody can pickup as fast as possible. Go.
Also it's not hard to hire Haskellers or Haskell-adjacent devs. Haskell in fact makes you stand out. Those sorts of people don't need months. I've seen people new to Haskell make their first commits within a week. And they weren't geniuses or anything. But they also didn't have an attitude about it.
I guess the problem with Haskell is not really hiring, but it is simply a very hard sell to people without academic background. Haskell is for sure elegant, and has some cool features, but this is too little to get wide adoption.
Seriously, what important industrial problems does it solve? Explain it to me like to a manager you met in an elevator. If you say e.g. lower bug rate, then be prepared to show some evidence (and no, please don't compare it to Python or other dynamic languages).
So "bug rate" is not a real hard metric anyways. And I only have my experience to go on.
But I will say that bugs in Haskell tend to be easier to diagnose (helpful at 2am) and aren't usually bad (although they can be). I have debugged Other People's Code while on-call in Haskell way easier than any other language.
And finally, the vast majority of bugs can be prevented or curbed by the type system. I find every time a Haskell company runs into a nasty bug or annoying issue, libraries that make use of the type system are made that reduce or remove that class of bug entirely. This sounds like you can do it in every language, but really what can be made a "library" in Haskell dwarfs what you can reasonably library-ify in most other languages.
Now, I can't give quantitative evidence of this because I don't even know how I would begin to measure it. But these qualities are definitely a big reason why I don't even listen to job offers that aren't Haskell anymore (going on 10 years of that soon) and I have and will promptly quit a job if the company moves off Haskell.
> I like Google's strategy of having the simplest language that anybody can pickup as fast as possible. Go.
And then you lose 50k whenever the app crashes in production because someone forgot a nil/err check and your tests didn't catch it. Or you pay extra 50k whenever the whole team needs to spend a week on finding a race condition caused by someone accidentally mutating a shared slice, 20 layers below the place the corruption was seen for the first time. Or you spend extra 50k over the year for fixing all the resource leaks caused by missing defers. Or you spend 50x50k to rewrite everything in a more performant stack because of GC pauses (Discord) ;).
There are multiple ways a project can fail or add unexpected costs, and likely there's no silver bullet. There are trade-offs.
And, btw, as for simplicity, there are dozens of languages easier to learn than Go. E.g. scratch, basic, brainfuck. Why not use them? ;)
Simplicity of a language has it costs. Programs written in simpler languages tend to be more complex to compensate for lower expressive power.
I like Google's strategy of having the simplest language that anybody can pickup as fast as possible. Go.