Hans van Thiel wrote:
Hello All,
I'm wondering why I can't find any commercial Haskell applications on the Internet. Is there any reason for this? I can think of the following possibilities only: 1) Haskell is too slow for practical use, but the benchmarks I found appear to contradict this. 2) Input and output are not good enough, in particular for graphical user interfacing and/or data base interaction. But it seems there are several user interfaces and SQL and other data base interfaces for Haskell, even though the tutorials don't seem to cover this. 3) Haskell is not scaleable for commercial use. This looks unlikely to me, but could this be a factor? 4) Haskell is open source and licensing restrictions forbid commercial applications. I haven't seen any such restrictions, but is this a problem for the standard modules?
I wonder, how many languages have you seen commercial applications written in? I suppose you mean the sort of applications that might be sold in stores. I think a more interesting question around Haskell is what it takes to succeed in writing an application in a relatively uncommon language, what aspects of popularity are actually useful, and how you can compensate. What languages have gotten big without being the main language for a popular operating system, or pushed really hard by a big company? Then there are moderately popular languages like perl and Python, but are there lots of commercial application even in those? Brandon