Comment by padthai
14 days ago
> 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
I don't think markdown conversion is a mass market application, but maybe personally I will indeed use it soon, so that would be something I guess ..
1 reply →
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.
"Haskell never got the “killer framework” like Rails or Spark that allowed to become more mainstream"
But why is that the case?
Thinking about writing a "killer framework" with huskell gives me a headache. Doing UI in huskell? Eventloop? Callbacks? Is that even possible, without doing awkward workarounds?
Haskell has yesod, which is Haskell’s Rails. It’s a batteries included web app scaffold. You still need to understand monads, though. But any Haskell shop with web apps is using that.
There’s also scotty and servant for web server stuff.
There’s Esqueleto and Persistent for doing postgreSQL database queries.
And so on.
2 replies →