Comment by lukan
12 days ago
As opposed to the abstract academic world?
The only time I had contact with Haskell was in university and I did not see it appealing back then, nor now, nor have I ever seen a program that I use, written in it.
So learning a bit of pure Haskell might have been beneficial for me to become a better programmer, but I still fail to see it being more than that - a academic language. Useful for didactic purposes. Less to actually ship software.
> nor have I ever seen a program that I use, written in it
The only mass market Haskell software that I know of is Pandoc. Others like Shellcheck and Postgrest are popular in their niche.
I am not sure that Haskell is faring worse that other programming languages in its level of popularity, like Julia, Clojure or Erlang.
Pandoc seems useful, but maybe "mass market" is a bit of an overstatement?
And since many programmers like myself had to learn Haskell, I think Haskell should have a better head start and be in a better position, if it would be so useful for "real world" use cases.
But please don't take this as an attack on haskell. I have nothing against the language, or its users and I did not suffered because of it in university, I am just curious on the appeal. Because I love clean solutions, but I also want to ship things. So part of me are wondering if I am missing out, but I so far I see not much convincing data. (But I am also mainly interested in high performance and real time graphics and haskell is really not the best here)
Pandoc is the standard for markdown conversion. Check out the comments in this recent thread (or pretty much any thread where markdown is mentioned):
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=markdown
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I am not a user of the language (although I learned it like you). I just came to chime in that (a) there is at least one very popular software written in Haskell and (b) Haskell seems to ship a good amount of software for its popularity.
Haskell never got the “killer framework” like Rails or Spark that allowed to become more mainstream, even if it was teached in Universities all over the world.
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