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iwince | 11 years ago

Why are there so many Haskell articles on HN? It seems like nearly every day there's one or more Haskell articles yet in the real world I've run into one guy in decades that even knew it.

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akg|11 years ago

"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" -- Alan Perlis

It's not solely just about if it is ready for commercial/real-world applications right now. The language itself is interesting and it definitely shapes a different mode of thinking.

Haskell is evolving rapidly and in interesting ways and those that are interesting in programming (as most of us here are), it's a good place to look and learn from.

actsasbuffoon|11 years ago

As an interesting side note, Microsoft just open sourced Bond. It's written in Haskell, and is a high performance, cross-language, schematized serialization tool. The project describes itself as widely used in many of Microsoft's high scalability services.

Microsoft has many proponents and detractors on HN, but no one can deny that they have plenty of services that get lots of traffic. If Haskell is serving a critical role in many of those services, then it seems that it is ready for commercial/real-world applications.

dllthomas|11 years ago

Lots of cool stuff is happening in the language, and more people are getting excited about it.

andrewchambers|11 years ago

People love the idea of learning it. Though often give up. Just like learning foreign language.

dllthomas|11 years ago

Yeah, I initially decided to learn it mostly because "lazy" was not a point in the space of programming languages that I had explored.