Hi Dennis,

At skedge.me, our platform is Haskell on the backend and JavaScript on the frontend, and we've definitely found that we have far fewer bugs coming out of the backend than the frontend. I think Haskell's language features (including the type system and sum types, most prominently) are responsible for much of this difference.

We've also been able to completely eliminate certain kinds of bugs, such as accidentally performing side effects during a database transaction (which might be rolled back), by using monads to enforce our application's layer architecture.

It's certainly possible to write very buggy code in Haskell, but Haskell gives you a lot of tools that you can use to prevent yourself from writing bugs. In my experience, it is much more efficient than achieving the same level of quality using only testing.

Ryan

On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 1:09 PM, Dennis Raddle <dennis.raddle@gmail.com> wrote:

I was thinking about why it seems I can write Haskell code without bugs in a much easier way than imperative languages. Part of it is the strict type-checking, but I think there is something more. It's the potential for conciseness. I work hard when programming in Haskell to take advantage of language features that make my program concise. Somehow this leads me to think about it in a certain way. I know I'm on track as it gets smaller and smaller. And as it gets smaller, it leads me to think about my logic's cases and things like that. Certain patterns show up and I think about what those patterns mean for the structure of my problem.

By the time I'm done with all that, I've analyzed my problem much more thoroughly than I would ever do in an imperative language.

Dennis

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