Comment by lukan
14 days ago
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 ..
You originally asked about a program that you use (or would use?) written in Haskell. Someone brought up Pandoc, the swiss army knife of Markdown and similar formats, and every programmer uses Markdown in some capacity. Then you chose to fixate on the phrase “mass market” software, as if that was relevant to your original claim: a program that a programmer would use.
Which demonstrates my point. Someone with this attitude has already dug their heels in and made up their mind.
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.
Yesod seems interesting indeed.
Even though they are biased:
"From a purely technical point of view, Haskell seems to be the perfect web development tool."
But I skimmed the tutorials and can say, I am really not surprised, why it did not take off.
The perfect web developement tool is simple in my opinion. Yesod isn't.
I took a look at Yesod and looks more like Haskell’s Sinatra and comes 6 years later than Rails, in 2010. By 2010 a simple web frameworm is table stakes, no huge differentiator.