I like Haskell, but I think it suffers from the same issues preventing most lisps to gain any traction: every codebase is different and reinvents its own DSL or uses different extensions.
Lispers hailing macros and metaprogramming cannot understand that power is also the very thing that makes jumping from project to project difficult, I have no intention of relearning your cleverly designed DSL or new extensions.
There's a reason why Java or PHP have plenty of widely used killer software, while monocle-wielding lispers and haskellers have very little to show after many decades.
It's not FP being the issue, it's just that their power attracts crowds interested in code more than the features/business/product.
I don't blame them, I love Haskell and Racket but I think very few teams can scale and make the compromise worth it.
The upside for haskell is that whenever you come to some new code, or return to your own old DSL-y code, the types are there as spikes in a cliff to help you move onward. With, e.g elisp, I always get a mild headache when I need to add some new feature to a codebase I myself wrote.
Perl was like this, though it did have wide adoption at one point. But people got sick of having 20 ways to do the same thing so Python was born. Is there an equivalent in the FP world?
I've used Haskell several times for implementing isolated 'maths business logic units in commercial backend applications.
In one such system I built had the main (REST API exposing) backend implemented in Kotlin with a separate application in Haskell doing a complex set of maths driven business rules against GIS data to calculate area specific prices.
The amount of IO on the Haskell side was fairly minimum and abstracted away quite nicely.
Haskell allowed expressing all complexity in a way that was easy to audit and translate from business/data analyst requirements.
Would do again :-) But only with the correct amount isolation so you can lean into Haskell's strong sides.
Everyone else is responding with FOSS, so I'll respond with some companies:
Co-Star, the astrology SaaS, is apparently written with a Haskell backend. I'd love to have seen the casting call for that.
I believe the Mercury bank also runs most of their backend stuff on Haskell. Functional languages in general are surprisingly common among financial investment firms.
Some of Target's stuff is written in Haskell. I think there was at least one big Facebook project that was written in Haskell, but they may have moved away from it by now. Awake Security does some Haskell stuff.
One thing which might be surprising is Haskell is apparently quite strong for general backend web dev.
> Haskell is apparently quite strong for general backend web dev
Yep. Mostly because of the https://www.servant.dev/ framework (but see also IHP, Yesod, and other frameworks). Servant lets you declare your HTTP API at the type level, and then it will infer the correct types for your endpoint handlers. You can also extract OpenAPI specs from it, generate clients for Haskell or other languages, etc.
My current employer, Bellroy, uses Haskell for pretty much all new code and Servant for all new HTTP APIs. https://exploring-better-ways.bellroy.com/our-technology-sta... is an older post discussing the shift to Haskell. We've found Haskell code to be much more compact than the equivalent Ruby, and significantly more robust.
Going from Ruby to Haskell is, itself, quite a good signal of quality for me. Start strong and end stronger. Sounds like you've got a good thing going!
I maintain Haskell code for five different customers, some large projects, some smaller, projects of varying ages up to over a decade. All the projects do "server backend" stuff, some web frontend too. I love how secure I feel making changes to things I haven't touched in a while.
It does one of the things I find most annoying about Haskell programmers, which is that they think the language is magic just because it has ADTs.
> HASKELL MAKES ILLEGAL STATES UNREPRESENTABLE.
That's not true!
It's especially not true for numeric programming, Haskell really doesn't provide good support for that. Basically only Ada and dependent-type languages do.
It is most definitely true for numeric programming (and Haskell is _somewhat_ dependently typed). For example, look at this finite bit width concatenation operation:
By "support" I don't mean that you can do it. Rather I meant the opposite - it doesn't stop you from doing it incorrectly. There isn't a lot of thought put into ranged integer types, floating point modes, etc.
I see. You're probably correct about that. I guess I got thrown off by your suggestion that dependently typed provide good support for numeric programming, because I doubt any dependently typed language that put a lot of thought into floating point modes (and I'm not aware any has particularly good suppose for ranged integer types either, but I could just be uneducated in that regard).
How could I forget Serokell, too! An Estonian software development firm that uses Haskell and Nix as basic building blocks.
I think they were using Agda or something too for a while, but it appears I can't find what I'm thinking of on their site anymore. Really interesting guys if you're located in the Baltic states.
I've said for awhile that Pandoc is one of the very few Haskell programs that isn't exclusively used by Haskell programmers.
There are plenty of interesting Haskell programs (e.g. Xmonad, Darcs), but a lot of people explicitly use them because they're Haskell.
Pandoc, on the other hand, is useful to pretty much anyone who has ever needed to convert documents. It's one of the first things I install on most computers.
There are stronger reasons to avoid wayland. It's a protocol that manages to have all implementations slightly different, and creating an EGL context per the glxgears results in a hard crash, both with AMD and NVIDIA cards. I assume I messed up the EGL context, but why does my entire desktop need to crash? Xkill is a much better UX, and that's kinda sad. An Xorg app failing dramatically doesn't murder my desktop session
If you want to stay in the land of monads there is https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula?tab=readme-ov-file "a VR window manager for Linux". Should've been called MetaMonad ;) but I guess that was already taken by the phylum metamonada, don't want to get on their bad side.
I think Pandoc too, but yeah it's a fairly accurate meme that Haskell isn't really used to make anything except Haskell compilers and tutorials. Last time I checked there was actually an exhaustive list of software written in Haskell somewhere, which they meant as a "look how successful it is - all these projects!" but is really "it's so unsuccessful we can actually write down every project using it".
