On 31 May 2012 01:30, Jonathan Geddes
I love Haskell. It is my absolute favorite language. But I have a very hard time finding places where I can actually use it! This has been bugging me for years and, like you, I think we ought to lean towards web-pages and mobile devices.
Yesod has been a tremendous push forward in this direction but, as you already stated, the browser and android devices remain mostly unexplored in Haskell. Here's my bit: - There's a port of ghc for iphone. - There's frege (http://code.google.com/p/frege/), a non-strict, pure, functional programming language in the spirit of Haskell. - I've been working as a freelance developer for some time now. I focus on desktop apps in Haskell. I can't say I'm overwhelmed by the amount of offers (speaking of which, if anyone needs a freelance haskell developer,... ahem), but this area will not be clinically "dead" as long as we cannot use web applications knowing (99% sure) that the owner of the website cannot use our personal information for any purpose other than giving us our service. There's only two kinds of clients here, though: those that explicitly want Haskell, and those than don't care about the programming language. Otherwise, you'll have to sell Haskell and, personally, I'm not that good a salesman (10% success, tops). - I've also ported Haskell designs to other programming languages (with small adaptations). I only found this cost-effective because the code in Haskell was not going to be thrown away. Good luck. Please, let us know what you find. Cheers, Ivan.
I had hoped that compiling Haskell to C with -fvia-C (or would it be just -C?) would allow Haskell to run in new, uncharted territory such as Android (with NDK), IOS, Google's NaCl, etc. But today I learned that GHC's C backend has been deprecated! Is it more difficult than I am imagining to get Haskell to work in these environments? Is it simply a matter of low interest in this kind of work? Or something more fundamental? Am I missing something?
I'm hoping that the Haskell->JavaScript efforts will mature enough to make Haskell viable for client-side web apps. (I think the first sign of this will be a self-hosting Haskell->JavaScript compiler.)
I use Haskell for Server-Side code with various web frameworks, but over the years more and more of the app logic is moved into client-side JavaScript, leaving the server-side code as little more than a simple validation and security layer over the database and other services. Haskell doesn't have any trouble with this, of course, but it's not exactly a role where it can shine. (Of course this is not true of ALL server-side code, just the kind of apps I have been writing.)
So anyway I'd like to request feedback: where can I use Haskell besides simple CLI utilities, dull server code, or project Euler problems? Even if it's just to contribute to getting Haskell in the environments mentioned above, any feedback is welcome!
Thanks for reading,
--J Arthur
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