Comment by agentultra
15 days ago
> To be able to maintain something you need to be able to transfer the ownership of the piece of code to someone else. You need to be able to amend the code easily to extend or to remove functionality. It means that the code can be easily split into pieces that can be given to multiple developers to work simultaneously towards a common goal.
> Haskell scores poorly on any of those points
Interesting. I work at a company with over a hundred people committing to a Haskell code-base that runs our entire back-end. As far as I can tell we're continuously shipping code several times a day, every day, with very low impact on our service level indicators.
When we do have production issues they're rarely attributed to Haskell. I can think of one incident in 3 years where a space leak was caught in production. It was straight forward to address and fix before it impacted customers.
In practice, Haskell has been amazing to work with. I just rewrote over a thousand lines of code and shipped that to production without incident. I've never had that go off easily in any other language I've worked with (and I've been around for over twenty years and worked in everything from C, C++, Python, and JS).
I worked for a company that had a product with several million lines of C, couple hundreds of lines of Java, same for Go, Ruby and Python.
And it worked great! And you know why? -- The programmers were skilled at what they were doing. There were about 60 employees in total, and they managed a relatively big codebase for a complicated product (distributed filesystem). Btw, our build system was written in Haskell.
And why do I mention this? -- because I also worked in many other companies, who used all the same languages, typically for much smaller codebases compared to the number of people working on them. And the effects were usually awful.
In conclusion: the choice of language doesn't define the outcome. You may be successful choosing a bad language if you hire good programmers and other stars align to make it happen. You can also easily fail if you use a good language, but other, more important conditions don't hold.
Your individual success is at best an indication that it's possible to use Haskell to achieve your goals. It doesn't mean it's a good tool. You didn't even try to have a test that'd compare Haskell to other languages, you don't have any explanation for why Haskell is good for your case. It just worked "somehow".
What I say, I saw from a more general perspective, and with some justification. But if you need examples rather than justification: at one point in the past, Japanese high-schools used Haskell to teach computer science. I was able to compare the experience to Basic and Pascal which I experienced personally. In the hands of a mediocre-bad programmer Haskell is an awful tool and produces far worse results than Basic or Pascal. And, surprise, most programmers in the world are mediocre-bad. You cannot take your example and extrapolate from it that if everyone used Haskell software would've been better. In fact, there's every indication it wouldn't. In most likelyhood it'd be a lot worse.
I’ve been in this industry for over twenty years. I’ve written a fair share of code in other languages. There’s not enough empirical evidence to suggest that one language is better than any other.
My example is only a counter argument that Haskell isn’t suitable because of the reasons you stated. Clearly it can be maintained, work can be split among groups, and delivered with reasonable efficiency… like a lot of software can be in other languages.