as far as my math goes: if false all true
I use to think the same until I set up my own company. At the end of the day, a company is black box with money getting in and money getting out. The goal is to make the outs bigger that the ins and itās hard.
So what ever one thinks of its management, the simple fact the the company exists and is able to pay its developpers, means that somenone in the chain of commands is doing it right.
Even though it involvesd hiring a crap teach leader, chosing the āwrongā language etc ā¦ If the company is making money, they made the right decision (for them). If they made the wrong decisions, well, there will be no developpers moaning about anything.
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Youāre aware most tech companies donāt make any money (profit) for years, but burn investments?
Even Grab, one of the major tech company players in SEA, is still not profitable.
So the fact that youāre working at a company that pays their engineers and doesnāt go bankrupt usually has very little to do with their tech decisions, but whether they still attract investors.
Those bad decisions often donāt show significant effect during chaotic startup phase, but manifest much later.
Note: Iām not advocating for companies to use Haskell. Iām questioning whether the average tech lead decision has any meaningful feedback value for us. You could as well ask the average programmer what they think about Haskell and most of them will either say they never heard of it or itās some academic nonsense.
So yes, surveys that target existing or previous Haskell users have more value.
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I would be interested in what is actually the percentage of dev working for ātechā companies.
All the companies I worked for where not tech companies and where actually making profit.
In fact, I actually donāt know personnaly anybody working for a company burning investements.
There are quite a few in the blockchain domain (doing Haskellā¦ but those usually have excellent tech leads IME).
Well I donāt know anybody working in the block chain industry. Anyway Iām not sure bloch chain industry is a good representative of the real world.
Do you work for a company making loss then ?
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Ironically enough, IOHK/IOG has done a lot to Haskell ecosystem money wise. But not sure if itās sufficiently appreciated. Due to both the toxic elements in blockchain industry and the fact that most companies as hasufell suspected is burning money which can result envy.
But again, thatās the irony, some of those money burned may have helped Haskell a lot tooā¦
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IOHK/IOG has definitely put a lot of money and effort into the Haskell ecosystem in various ways, particularly into GHC but also in other ways.
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Anyway. Weāre getting side tracked.
My point was: just because youāre getting paid and your company is not bankrupt (yet), doesnāt mean they made any good decisions.
In a lot of cases, my guess is that bad tech decisions often donāt even matter for the business as a whole. Things keep rolling anyway.
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As someone whose work is largely pretty standard web services stuff with a side of AWS and Kafka, Iād say yes, you can build it all out in an ok general-purpose programming language, but Haskell has been an excellent choice. Itās so much easier to parse inputs properly and generate outputs which match the expected schemata, and Iād almost say that newtype alone is worth the price of admission.
The āHaskell people only write DSLsā meme is alive and well, in the sense that among our other projects, we have a bunch of small DSLs. They enable our business people to configure systems without involving us and have been a big success. Itās really cool when they put orthogonal features together in unexpected ways and pull off things you didnāt think possible.
haskell.nix has been tremendously useful for us, as itās made it quite easy to build compressed, statically-linked binaries which deploy to AWS Lambda.
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Exactly! But weāre also pitching Haskell as a General Purpose programming language, so weāre absolutely competing with rust, c#, python, js/ts, and every other general purpose language.
So if Haskell wants to compete as a general purpose PL, it needs to attract customers who just need an ok general purpose programming language
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Haskell is a niche language. It isnāt for everybody, every company, or even every use-case (at least not for everyone). But also because of that, it doesnāt really ācompeteā with those other languages. Framing it as zero-sum competition is a road that leads to (success at all costs) imo.
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Correct:
Unfortunately, some would probably question the current stability of that foundation these days, which can all too easily leave an impression of (Glasgow) Haskell now being just another niche language - thereās nothing particularly innovative about frequently-broken codeā¦
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This is why I keep on pushing trying to expand the Haskell community. The scary thing is that āAvoid Success at All Costsā can easily morph into āAvoid Life At All Costsā, because being overly principled can eventually become āIād rather our language become the new Smalltalk than try to push for mass industrial or educational adoptionā.
A larger community means that there are more programmers working on more libraries, #1, #2, there are more people available to work on the compiler, when we know that GHC needs an overhaul to get a hold of dependent types.
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This seems largely contradictory. Hoping for more (average) users and assuming they will appreciate dependent types, while those are already controversial within the core community.
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I just had a morning browsing of SimpleX code base : GitHub - simplex-chat/simplex-chat: SimpleX - the first messaging platform operating without user identifiers of any kind - 100% private by design! iOS and Android apps are released š±!. No fancy effects system or types, down to earth code in the wild for an app thatās already been noticed by Jack Dorsey once.
I think we should stop lamenting for one old timer leaving, heads down and build. We all know Haskell strength: you can build down to earth practical application, or you can be fancily typed close to theoretical cutting edge; all together while being pure and principled. Tell me another language can do that.
And please letās forget about this thread for good.
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Being in the Haskell community is a constant learning process. The people who refuse to learn and treat the advanced features of the language as Blub eventually leave.
Some average programmers will end up Blubbing their way out, another section will grow slowly and stay, while another section will grow quickly and become GHC contributors.
Broadening the community beyond its traditional audience will diminish average useful conversion rates, but will still increase the overall number of useful Haskellers.
Of course I wouldnāt suggest going full-hog into this concept; but using it to maintain stability (preferably at 3x current usage rates, see SPJās slides on when a language is immortal) is useful.
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Welcome to C++. A hot mess and kitchen sink of a language.
Itās not features that make a language complete.
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Thanks, this was exactly what I meant
Correction: they are not āprofitableā because they reinvest their profits to maintain a loss/zero profit so they can evade taxes. If a company doesnāt show revenue promise investors will spurn them in a heartbeat.
The āaverageā tech lead deals with much more than just tech, external stakeholders have to be pacified and nobody is going to like āhurr durr our code will be more correct but the backlog is 500% our output right nowā. The business is your investor, and investors dont like that their money is going down the drain because you canāt produce code and features fast enough to adapt to market conditions.
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