7 ms·

Our Use of Haskell and Elm

143 points by blackRust 8y ago

tchaffee 8y ago
What I liked about this article is that rather than being a complete sales pitch it mentions the cons about adopting a language that is not used at mass scale. The biggest one being the ability to find and hire talent. They get around this challenge by being willing to train, which is reasonable. And refreshing to not see that real challenge swept under the carpet.
- borge 8y ago
  I've always thought that hiring i.e. haskell developers would be easier than for more widely used languages like java and python as I've assumed that the talent-to-jobs ratio would be a lot higher. I actually have no idea though.
- sanityinc 8y ago
  Author here - thanks very much. That was what I was going for.
specializeded 8y ago
They mention plentiful motivated job applications, how is the market from the perspective of a developer looking to focus on Haskell?
- pmulv 8y ago
  Just as some anecdata, I know of a single developer who works with Haskell; they do fluid dynamics programming for ExxonMobil in Houston.
- Tehnix 8y ago
  There are more and more jobs coming up, some remote and some not. A lot of them get posted on https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/ https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/, which is fairly active, worth keeping an eye on it.
- paidleaf 8y ago
  > They mention plentiful motivated job applications I'd take anything from an advocacy article with a grain of salt. > how is the market from the perspective of a developer looking to focus on Haskell? Considering the only response you got points you to a subreddit, I'm guessing it isn't so great. At best, it is a niche market ( though that could be lucrative ). I wouldn't put all my eggs in one basket. I'd make sure you have some expertise in Java, C#, C++, Python, etc ( don't forget SQL ) where there is a large established market that isn't going anywhere soon. But even more important, get experience in specific technologies ( databases , web servers, IDEs, version control, etc ).
  - Tehnix 8y ago
    There are two sides to the coin. It is a LOT easier to hire for a Haskell developer, because the pool of jobs is so small compared to the amount of people that would like to work with Haskell in their daily life. That of course also means that the opposite is true for someone looking for a job—it's a lot harder to find something, so most trudge on, writing code in some language and then use Haskell in their spare time. The last part usually also mean that the developers you find, as a company looking for someone, usually have a higher lower bar, by the very nature of having invested time into learning a niche language. Of course, that goes for most such cases as above, not that Haskellers are magically better programmers.
  - danharaj 8y ago
    > Considering the only response you got points you to a subreddit Funnily enough, a job posting was made on r/haskell since that comment was posted. It's not a bad space to watch for jobs.
    - tome 8y ago
      And another one ...
salimmadjd 8y ago
Learning ELM really helped me learn Haskell which is something I'm continuing to do, but Elm helped a lot. So I can see why a Haskell shop would want to use Elm for their frontend work. This makes total sense. That said, my initial enthusiasm for using Elm, aside from a gateway-drug to Haskell, has waned. I just do not have enough confidence in adopting Elm for our internal project nor to recommend it to other companies. The last release of Elm was 1 year and 8 months ago. The new release is purported to break many things. However, this new release is unknown, it's really unknown when it's going to be released and aside from a few insiders and contributors no one else seem to know what to expect. Elm applies some interesting principles (type safety, purity, etc.) that helps to reason about your code. But, it's direction is driven by one person. That in itself is not bad, however, there is very little communication coming out of him (the last blog update by him was 1.5 years ago). Because of that, I started looking at Reason and what FB and others are doing. I think it makes no sense to invest months or years into something like Elm at this point and any advantages Elm might have had initially, is coming to parity with other solutions. I still think if you want to get your hands dirty with functional programming, play around with Elm. The Pragmatic Studio Elm lesson is great starting point. But look elsewhere for any serious projects.
- Skinney 8y ago
  Why does it matter when the next release is coming, as long as the project is actively maintained?
  - chosenbreed 8y ago
    Good point. Spare a thought for anyone who's gone through the various releases of Angular in the last 18 months. The other points may be valid though...
  - ModernMech 8y ago
    Elm doesn't need to be merely maintained, it needs to grow and evolve.
  - salimmadjd 8y ago
    That's a valid point. In this case, two reasons: 1 - active development is relevant. Is it being updated once a year, once a month. Is it going to take 1 year, 2 or 3 years. 2 - Above is not a deal breaker along. But, the new release is going to break stuff. you need to have ability to plan around things, especially as the new release will have paradigm shift (from what I'm gathering). You don't want to write lines and lines of code, then needing to rewrite it all. I think what makes it even more unreliable, is lack of any communications. I think part of the problem is, Evan (the creator) probably is still not sure what this future looks like. He is very articulate, but not seeing any blog post update makes a reasonable person assume that this new release has not been fully conceived. So, everyone knows there will be a break change. But who knows what will break, when it will be released, etc. On top of that, this new update has become a gatekeeper for bunch of pull requests and bugs on the existing system that is not being touched. The people who sit next to Evan the author of Elm in Action and the biggest users of Elm (Richard Feldman) has pushed back the release of his book by one year. Basically the remaining part of his book, is all the SPA stuff that the version of Elm is supposed deal with. From what I've seen, it seems like even he doesn't know what to expect [0] Put everything I mentioned together, it makes it hard to recommend Elm for anything your company will be depending on, especially when there are other solutions out there. Why take the risk. [0] https://www.manning.com/books/elm-in-action https://www.manning.com/books/elm-in-action
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Arubis 8y ago
I’m confused by the discussion of bringing new programmers on a team up to speed with these lesser-used languages; this blog is quite explicitly from a one-man dev shop.
- smt88 8y ago
  He seems to do contract work with teams. The bio might be old.
- castlegloom 8y ago
  the use of "our" threw me off a bunch, unless they're referring to clients
- aeorgnoieang 8y ago
  I'm guessing he's working with other people; a "team" perhaps. Consultants are, sometimes, hired to work for or with companies; even for long periods!
- klmr 8y ago
  I’m assuming that the author is describing his experience working as a consultant for a software company with a larger team. The article explicitly refers to multiple programmers working on the code base.
- eindiran 8y ago
  From the article: "Both the Haskell and Elm code-bases are worked upon by multiple developers simultaneously."
- pyrale 8y ago
  We do the same in several teams of 5+ people, in a company having 3k employees. I don't understand what lets you come to your conclusion.
  - latexr 8y ago
    On the “About this site”, on the right, it says: > Hi, I'm Steve Purcell - Sanity, Inc. is my one-man consultancy and software house.
xfer 8y ago
Why are they not using ghcjs? Wouldn't that work nicely with their existing infrastucture and codebase?
- Tehnix 8y ago
  GHCJS is a beast to bring in, and brings lots of complications with it. The build tools and environment around it is also not great, and most development tools that work for GHC break down for GHCJS. That's not to say it can't be used, in fact a lot do quite successfully, but it is a BIG increase in complexity. I'm more hopeful for approaches such as WebGHC[0] or perhaps more promising, Tweags Asterius[1] :) [0] https://webghc.github.io/roadmap https://webghc.github.io/roadmap [1] https://github.com/tweag/asterius https://github.com/tweag/asterius
- sanityinc 8y ago
  Author here. I answered this and other questions in discussions on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/8ye1h0/explaining_why_our_team_picked_haskell_and_elm/ https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/8ye1h0/explaining_...
platz 8y ago
So, what does HN think of PureScript these days?
- christophilus 8y ago
  Can't speak for HN, but I really liked tinkering with it. If I remember correctly, its data structures were just basic JS data structures under the hood (e.g. JS arrays, objects, etc), which meant it didn't show the same perf benefits of a language that uses persistent data structures under the hood (e.g. Clojure, OCaml/Reason). I wonder if that has changed since I took a look.
  - platz 8y ago
    Cool you liked it - I recently had a similar experience replacing from JQuery froms with it. It does by default it provide access to native JS data structures, but you don't have to use them e.g. there are persistent structures as well. https://pursuit.purescript.org/packages/purescript-ordered-collections/1.0.0 https://pursuit.purescript.org/packages/purescript-ordered-c... though I don't quite understand the comment that persistent data structures are "slower" than native structures; I thought usually, it's the other way around.
- kepano 8y ago
  We're active users of PureScript at Lumi (W15). We started experimenting with Haskell on the backend about two years ago and it was a huge success for many of the same reasons stated by the OP. We've now completely moved from Node to Haskell for our API. Since then we've continued to double down on type-driven development and bringing it to the frontend with PureScript made sense. It helps that Phil Freeman, its creator, is on our team :) We've been dipping our toes into open-sourcing more PureScript libraries, such as our React bindings: https://github.com/lumihq https://github.com/lumihq
deathtrader666 8y ago
Check out Miso [1] a frontend framework built in Haskell. [1] - https://haskell-miso.org/ https://haskell-miso.org/
- frou_dh 8y ago
  I look at the opening stanza of the first example: https://github.com/dmjio/miso/blob/master/examples/todo-mvc/Main.hs https://github.com/dmjio/miso/blob/master/examples/todo-mvc/... "We're not in Kansas anymore"
  - Tarean 8y ago
    RecordWildCards and DeriveGeneric are clearly used but fairly basic. OverloadedStrings seems to be used for MisoString. The other extensions don't seem to be used so it probably isn't as bad as it looks.
pushpankar 8y ago
> "Haskell has excellent libraries for integrating with databases and web services, and for building API services." I tried using Haskell for my side project(group chat type). Its libraries are nowhere near matured ones like Phoenix.
- pyrale 8y ago
  What libraries did you use, and which problems did you encounter ?

143 points by blackRust 8y ago

What I liked about this article is that rather than being a complete sales pitch it mentions the cons about adopting a language that is not used at mass scale. The biggest one being the ability to find and hire talent. They get around this challenge by being willing to train, which is reasonable. And refreshing to not see that real challenge swept under the carpet.

borge 8y ago
I've always thought that hiring i.e. haskell developers would be easier than for more widely used languages like java and python as I've assumed that the talent-to-jobs ratio would be a lot higher. I actually have no idea though.
sanityinc 8y ago
Author here - thanks very much. That was what I was going for.

specializeded 8y ago

They mention plentiful motivated job applications, how is the market from the perspective of a developer looking to focus on Haskell?

pmulv 8y ago
Just as some anecdata, I know of a single developer who works with Haskell; they do fluid dynamics programming for ExxonMobil in Houston.
Tehnix 8y ago
There are more and more jobs coming up, some remote and some not. A lot of them get posted on https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/ https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/, which is fairly active, worth keeping an eye on it.
paidleaf 8y ago
> They mention plentiful motivated job applications I'd take anything from an advocacy article with a grain of salt. > how is the market from the perspective of a developer looking to focus on Haskell? Considering the only response you got points you to a subreddit, I'm guessing it isn't so great. At best, it is a niche market ( though that could be lucrative ). I wouldn't put all my eggs in one basket. I'd make sure you have some expertise in Java, C#, C++, Python, etc ( don't forget SQL ) where there is a large established market that isn't going anywhere soon. But even more important, get experience in specific technologies ( databases , web servers, IDEs, version control, etc ).
- Tehnix 8y ago
  There are two sides to the coin. It is a LOT easier to hire for a Haskell developer, because the pool of jobs is so small compared to the amount of people that would like to work with Haskell in their daily life. That of course also means that the opposite is true for someone looking for a job—it's a lot harder to find something, so most trudge on, writing code in some language and then use Haskell in their spare time. The last part usually also mean that the developers you find, as a company looking for someone, usually have a higher lower bar, by the very nature of having invested time into learning a niche language. Of course, that goes for most such cases as above, not that Haskellers are magically better programmers.
- danharaj 8y ago
  > Considering the only response you got points you to a subreddit Funnily enough, a job posting was made on r/haskell since that comment was posted. It's not a bad space to watch for jobs.
  - tome 8y ago
    And another one ...

salimmadjd 8y ago

Learning ELM really helped me learn Haskell which is something I'm continuing to do, but Elm helped a lot. So I can see why a Haskell shop would want to use Elm for their frontend work. This makes total sense. That said, my initial enthusiasm for using Elm, aside from a gateway-drug to Haskell, has waned. I just do not have enough confidence in adopting Elm for our internal project nor to recommend it to other companies. The last release of Elm was 1 year and 8 months ago. The new release is purported to break many things. However, this new release is unknown, it's really unknown when it's going to be released and aside from a few insiders and contributors no one else seem to know what to expect. Elm applies some interesting principles (type safety, purity, etc.) that helps to reason about your code. But, it's direction is driven by one person. That in itself is not bad, however, there is very little communication coming out of him (the last blog update by him was 1.5 years ago). Because of that, I started looking at Reason and what FB and others are doing. I think it makes no sense to invest months or years into something like Elm at this point and any advantages Elm might have had initially, is coming to parity with other solutions. I still think if you want to get your hands dirty with functional programming, play around with Elm. The Pragmatic Studio Elm lesson is great starting point. But look elsewhere for any serious projects.

Skinney 8y ago
Why does it matter when the next release is coming, as long as the project is actively maintained?
- chosenbreed 8y ago
  Good point. Spare a thought for anyone who's gone through the various releases of Angular in the last 18 months. The other points may be valid though...
- ModernMech 8y ago
  Elm doesn't need to be merely maintained, it needs to grow and evolve.
- salimmadjd 8y ago
  That's a valid point. In this case, two reasons: 1 - active development is relevant. Is it being updated once a year, once a month. Is it going to take 1 year, 2 or 3 years. 2 - Above is not a deal breaker along. But, the new release is going to break stuff. you need to have ability to plan around things, especially as the new release will have paradigm shift (from what I'm gathering). You don't want to write lines and lines of code, then needing to rewrite it all. I think what makes it even more unreliable, is lack of any communications. I think part of the problem is, Evan (the creator) probably is still not sure what this future looks like. He is very articulate, but not seeing any blog post update makes a reasonable person assume that this new release has not been fully conceived. So, everyone knows there will be a break change. But who knows what will break, when it will be released, etc. On top of that, this new update has become a gatekeeper for bunch of pull requests and bugs on the existing system that is not being touched. The people who sit next to Evan the author of Elm in Action and the biggest users of Elm (Richard Feldman) has pushed back the release of his book by one year. Basically the remaining part of his book, is all the SPA stuff that the version of Elm is supposed deal with. From what I've seen, it seems like even he doesn't know what to expect [0] Put everything I mentioned together, it makes it hard to recommend Elm for anything your company will be depending on, especially when there are other solutions out there. Why take the risk. [0] https://www.manning.com/books/elm-in-action https://www.manning.com/books/elm-in-action

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Arubis 8y ago

I’m confused by the discussion of bringing new programmers on a team up to speed with these lesser-used languages; this blog is quite explicitly from a one-man dev shop.

smt88 8y ago
He seems to do contract work with teams. The bio might be old.
castlegloom 8y ago
the use of "our" threw me off a bunch, unless they're referring to clients
aeorgnoieang 8y ago
I'm guessing he's working with other people; a "team" perhaps. Consultants are, sometimes, hired to work for or with companies; even for long periods!
klmr 8y ago
I’m assuming that the author is describing his experience working as a consultant for a software company with a larger team. The article explicitly refers to multiple programmers working on the code base.
eindiran 8y ago
From the article: "Both the Haskell and Elm code-bases are worked upon by multiple developers simultaneously."
pyrale 8y ago
We do the same in several teams of 5+ people, in a company having 3k employees. I don't understand what lets you come to your conclusion.
- latexr 8y ago
  On the “About this site”, on the right, it says: > Hi, I'm Steve Purcell - Sanity, Inc. is my one-man consultancy and software house.

xfer 8y ago

Why are they not using ghcjs? Wouldn't that work nicely with their existing infrastucture and codebase?

Tehnix 8y ago
GHCJS is a beast to bring in, and brings lots of complications with it. The build tools and environment around it is also not great, and most development tools that work for GHC break down for GHCJS. That's not to say it can't be used, in fact a lot do quite successfully, but it is a BIG increase in complexity. I'm more hopeful for approaches such as WebGHC[0] or perhaps more promising, Tweags Asterius[1] :) [0] https://webghc.github.io/roadmap https://webghc.github.io/roadmap [1] https://github.com/tweag/asterius https://github.com/tweag/asterius
sanityinc 8y ago
Author here. I answered this and other questions in discussions on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/8ye1h0/explaining_why_our_team_picked_haskell_and_elm/ https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/8ye1h0/explaining_...

platz 8y ago

So, what does HN think of PureScript these days?

christophilus 8y ago
Can't speak for HN, but I really liked tinkering with it. If I remember correctly, its data structures were just basic JS data structures under the hood (e.g. JS arrays, objects, etc), which meant it didn't show the same perf benefits of a language that uses persistent data structures under the hood (e.g. Clojure, OCaml/Reason). I wonder if that has changed since I took a look.
- platz 8y ago
  Cool you liked it - I recently had a similar experience replacing from JQuery froms with it. It does by default it provide access to native JS data structures, but you don't have to use them e.g. there are persistent structures as well. https://pursuit.purescript.org/packages/purescript-ordered-collections/1.0.0 https://pursuit.purescript.org/packages/purescript-ordered-c... though I don't quite understand the comment that persistent data structures are "slower" than native structures; I thought usually, it's the other way around.
kepano 8y ago
We're active users of PureScript at Lumi (W15). We started experimenting with Haskell on the backend about two years ago and it was a huge success for many of the same reasons stated by the OP. We've now completely moved from Node to Haskell for our API. Since then we've continued to double down on type-driven development and bringing it to the frontend with PureScript made sense. It helps that Phil Freeman, its creator, is on our team :) We've been dipping our toes into open-sourcing more PureScript libraries, such as our React bindings: https://github.com/lumihq https://github.com/lumihq

deathtrader666 8y ago

Check out Miso [1] a frontend framework built in Haskell. [1] - https://haskell-miso.org/ https://haskell-miso.org/

frou_dh 8y ago
I look at the opening stanza of the first example: https://github.com/dmjio/miso/blob/master/examples/todo-mvc/Main.hs https://github.com/dmjio/miso/blob/master/examples/todo-mvc/... "We're not in Kansas anymore"
- Tarean 8y ago
  RecordWildCards and DeriveGeneric are clearly used but fairly basic. OverloadedStrings seems to be used for MisoString. The other extensions don't seem to be used so it probably isn't as bad as it looks.

pushpankar 8y ago

> "Haskell has excellent libraries for integrating with databases and web services, and for building API services." I tried using Haskell for my side project(group chat type). Its libraries are nowhere near matured ones like Phoenix.

pyrale 8y ago
What libraries did you use, and which problems did you encounter ?