Re: [Haskell-cafe] Comments requested: succ Java

If you have counterexamples, then perhaps you can name them. I'm looking for Java shops with 5+ developers and code bases of > 100k converting over to Haskell. I don't know _any such shop_ that has switched to Haskell, and I doubt any exist, but I'd be delighted to learn I'm wrong. Let me ask you this question: how long would it take you to get an HTML/CSS, W3 compliant browser in Haskell? Or how about a peer-to-peer networking system with seamless scaling and automatic failover? How about a scalable BigTable implementation? In Java, the answer to these questions -- and just about any others you can think of -- is "a few minutes", because the code has already been written. Libraries are _everything_. In many cases, they can increase your effective budget by 10x or even 100x. That means instead of having $100k for a project, you suddenly have $1 - 10 million worth of resources at your disposal. Regards, John A. De Goes N-Brain, Inc. The Evolution of Collaboration http://www.n-brain.net | 877-376-2724 x 101 On Sep 28, 2009, at 7:49 AM, Curt Sampson wrote:

On 2009-09-28 07:01 -0600 (Mon), John A. De Goes wrote:

...

And I stand by my statement that no Java shop is going to switch over to Haskell....

I have counterexamples. So "pfffft!"

...

...or the _billions of dollars_ worth of commercial- friendly open source libraries available for the Java platform.

Right; the library myth. I rank this one up there with, "Haskell can never be an effective programming language, because it doesn't have objects."

I've been hearing that having lots of libraries is an insurmountable advantage, and you're doomed if you give them up, since long before I took up Haskell. It's mostly myth promulgated by people driven by fear. I'm sure it's the case in some shops that they have lots of people who can glue libraries together but can't program, and they somehow manage to produce applications this way, but even that I suspect is not so frequent a situation as you'd think.

Nonetheless, since all of this is rather missing the point of my articles, anyway, I think I'll leave that as my last word on the topic.

cjs -- Curt Sampson +81 90 7737 2974 Functional programming in all senses of the word: http://www.starling-software.com