Haskell usage in industry is easily 10x bigger than it was 10 years ago. Anyone who was trying to get a job in Haskell at that time could not dispute that. I got my first Haskell job 9 years ago, and I found a couple of job ads in a year suitable for a developer on the junior/senior boundary; now there are a few of those a month.
hmm? Is it Tweag corporate pushing for those features? Or is it that the people pushing for those features happen to work for Tweag?
It’s less than clear to me why an industrial user would put up with an awful records ‘system’ and prioritise Dependent Types. Lack of (polymorphic, extensible) records is why I don’t promote Haskell to my industrial/commercial clients.
Again, I’m not claiming there’s a Haskell that’s “simple”. I want ‘small’. It’s not clear to me that conflating namespaces is essential for Dependent Types; even if it is, it’s clear that conflating namespaces has made the syntax a whole lot bigger. (Maybe it’s the trying to remain backwards-compatible that’s bloated it. Perhaps Tweag should start afresh, throw out the baggage and sponsor a Haskell 2030 or some such.)
Hmm, as I asked: where are all these people? Do they not care/not want to volunteer an opinion on where Haskell is going? Perhaps their employers are sticking at very old releases, because keeping up with the churn is a cost with little benefit?
As a point of comparison, look at the number of people with an opinion about the FTP/AMP library changes (and note the couple of 'stepping back’s towards the end of that month). How many of those are still active in Haskell?
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See @rae: Update on Dependent Haskell - YouTube (around 8:22). @rae mentions that companies like Serokell and Obsidian systems are paying their consultants work on dependent Haskell.
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Imho this claim requires much more concrete data. The ‘statistic’ might only apply to your local neighborhood.
Let’s not stir sleeping dogs. ‘FTP changes’ is a shorthand term for a bunch of stuff “technically a separate proposal” (and including reorging AMP), none of which were clearly signalled in advance; and that wiki substantially underestimates what was actually coming. (For example the wiki doesn’t mention the changes introduced a bunch of instances, that might have been contrary to instances other libraries had already written.)
Here might be a place to understand the sorry mess. (And SPJ’s attempt to ‘move forward’ a few messages later.) There’s a mix of people surprised at the suddenness/lack of notice; surprised at the decisions (some eventually persuaded they were ‘logical’); surprised at the scope/impact of what appeared in one release; as well as plain disagreeing with the decisions.
How many are no longer active? Searching for a few names + Haskell yields recent results (at least >2020) for every name I’ve tried. Update: I haven’t found anything about Brian O’Sullivan.
I was searching for jobs globally then and I’m talking about global availability of jobs now.
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Oh, so you were talking about the process, and naturally, the details of the breakage? I did not know it was this serious. I guess I liked streamlined F-A-M aftermath, but I certainly might not appreciate the change if I were involved with haskell beforehand.
I wonder how it served the researchers. Was it for their best interest? Surely it is, right? Otherwise why would such a change happen.
Well, imho ‘global’ does not add much to the data point. It is still a single data point, and likely it is coming from certain surface. One possibility is that the entire pool of businesses on haskell has been decreasing, while haskell businesses have been gathering together in one particular group. Gives illusion that there came to be more haskell businesses.
I suspect they are happily earning a living, paying little attention to how the language and ecosystem evolve because they are sufficiently happy with how it is now and sufficiently happy with where it is going.
Granted, we can do much better in many things! But I don’t share your arch-pessimism, in fact I’m not pessimistic at all about the future of Haskell.
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The notion that commercial Haskell has grown by less than 10x in 10 years just doesn’t ring true based on my experience. You’re welcome to interpret this anecdotal evidence as you see fit.
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I mean, it is hard to believe when concrete statistics point the other direction.
There are tons of statistics indicating similar trends.
That’s a relative ranking. The languages that have overtaken Haskell have presumably grown even more than 10x. Swift didn’t even exist 10 years ago.
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Please share, particularly if you can produce a summary analysis. I would love to see!
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In fact Haskell has dropped six places from 13 to 19 in 10 years. During that time four languages that didn’t exist 10 years ago have taken places above it (Go, PowerShell, TypeScript, Swift), all with huge corporate backing. The only language that existed ten years ago that has overtaken Haskell is R. In conclusion, I’m not particularly convinced to draw pessimism from this chart.
Well, it also fell in market share as well. At least:
I don’t think it is just github growing, it is certainly a way to measure market share. Perhaps programming as a whole grew to be huge, but it does not change the fact that haskell is lagging behind.
My claim is about absolute numbers of commercial users, not relative numbers of a mix between industrial, hobbyist and academic (which is what Github share of MAU shows). Furthermore, adoption of Haskell is so small, relatively, that measurements will tend to be dominated by noise.
I just don’t see a cause for pessimism about the state of industrial Haskell adoption. It’s flourishing! Granted, we want it to flourish more.
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Hmm, I see. Yes, it is hard to find reasonable metric for haskell market size. I concur.
Maybe lots of haskell projects before were hobbyist, after all.
Also, I guess at haskell size, fluctuation is bound to be huge…
Btw, it is interesting how many articles consider haskell as dying, with likely lacking data.
Another anecdote:
I wonder if this link actually used the concrete measure, or just… TIOBE popularity ranking.
Probably they might need to be considered serious, as we haskellers would have a bias for haskell.
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Interesting discussion. I don’t actually find that I have much constructive to add, but I did want to answer this question:
Tweag has pushed, and continues to push, for linear types. I, who work for Tweag, am pushing for dependent types. Other folks at Tweag have somewhat separately identified that formal verification of software is a potential growth area. Right now, we’re focusing more on Liquid Haskell than dependent types as the best way of doing verification in practice. I believe that once Haskell has dependent types – and they have matured somewhat – using dependent types for verification will become more attractive, especially if we can work out how to connect the ease of Liquid Haskell with the power of full dependent types.
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