Haskell, and FP languages more broadly, are finding a pretty solid
niche in small scale, but technically demanding and lucrative
projects. Financial modeling and analytics are the first thing that
comes to mind. The work of Galois, Atom, etc also sort of fit this
mold.
While the people on this list are clearly leaning towards Haskell,
this is a niche that Haskell shares with OCaml, Erlang, and even Scala
and Clojure. Perhaps, combining efforts with those communities (call
it lambdajobs or something) would help get closer to a critical mass
and aid cross-pollination between communities. Considering the
salaries and value-add with skilled FP programmers, and the difficulty
in finding them, this could even be a profitable venture in the long
run if employers are charged for successful placements or for ads once
we get going.
Just my 2¢
Max
On Oct 1, 2009, at 11:56 AM, Curt Sampson wrote:
On 2009-09-29 13:18 +0200 (Tue), Alberto G. Corona wrote:
What is the vehicle that haskell can use to enter the mainstream?.
Actually, I have one more thought on that: wait.
I'd had the impression that Haskell was becoming fairly well known (if
not yet heavily used, in comparison to languages like Java), but I
just
ran across some hard evidence for this.
In the 32 languages ranked on http://www.langpop.com/ , Haskell
consistently comes down near the bottom in the various rankings of
use. (But hey, we're not so weird we're not in there!) But if you look
down near the bottom, at the chart labeled "Normalized Discussion Site
Results," you'll notice that Haskell comes out sixth. Even trying to
be
more fair to the mainstream, and changing the weighting to drop Lambda
the Ultimate completely (after all, they're just a bunch of academic
wankers, right?) and bring IRC down to a contribution of 0.5 instead
of
1 (apparently those academic wankers have lots of time to chat
online),
Haskell still comes out tenth, with a score over a third that of the
leader, Java, and close to half that of PHP and C (2nd and 3rd place,
respectively).
We've also got at least one undeniably good, production-quality
compiler
(which is more than PHP or Ruby can say), and have sold many tens of
thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, of books. At this
point,
I don't think many people (John A. De Goes excepted) are looking at
people writing major applications in Haskell as if they're aliens
living
on another planet.
Haskell is in the mainstream already as far as being taken seriously;
most of the complaints I'm seeing seem to be grasping at the same
kinds
of straws that the anti-Java guys were back in the late '90s. ("It's
hopeless if it uses garbage collection.")
We've even got our own over-hyped, under-utilized supposed benefit
("it's good for multicore").
The main whinging seems to be about libraries, of which we have "only"
1585 on hackage.
Compare with RubyForge, which has 2059 projects in "beta" or better
status, or 2961 if we include "alpha" as well. The Ruby Application
Archive has 1768 projects; I have no idea how much overlap there is,
or
how many of these are real.
I think we just need to sit tight for a couple of years.
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <c...@starling-software.com> +81 90 7737 2974
Functional programming in all senses of the word:
http://www.starling-software.com
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