Comment by padthai
14 days ago
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.