Hi Jesse, Just saw your email. I started the data science team at Zalora and was behind the adoption of Haskell. As a short background, I didn't know how to program 2 years ago, when I left a finance job for a small startup in Australia. I didn't know anything about business intelligence either, and started with excel sheets. But the work was very repetitive so I picked up programming to try and automate some of it. After I moved to the South East Asian version of the same company, Zalora, I had read up a lot more, including books like SICP, and all of Paul Graham's essays. I liked both his concept of the "blub" ladder of abstraction, and his idea of using a programming language as a "secret weapon". Lisp is nice, but the pure nature of Haskell and the work that was done on the compiler both convinced me that it was a better secret weapon to solve my issue of not having enough budget or time to set up a standard BI setup (I separately was not too happy with SaaS providers anyway, so decided that in-house was the only way we could afford what I wanted). I had picked up enough Haskell to hire the first person (Dat Le) on the basis of his answers to a bunch of exercises we used as a filter (we were also helped by Hisham Zarka, current CMO of another Rocket company, Namshi and former Googler in MV). Dat did an extraordinary amount of work acting as proof of concept, much of it in Haskell, so it worked out even better than expected and we picked up enough budget to build a proper team. We called it "Data Science" because that seems to be the current buzz word for hiring smart guys. Haskell is unique in that: - it has a well defined standard with enormous amounts of research going into it (both the language, and its libraries); - the purity simplifies scaling, which I already needed, as well as all the standard improvements from catching most bugs before compiling, shorter code, etc.; - it is relatively hard to write Haskell that compiles as a beginner, thus acting as a natural talent filter (that can be expanded upon: it also attracts the kind of people who enjoy programming for its own sake, just like Lisps). I would disagree that there are very few people that know the language. I did put up my first ad as Python, with a preference for people with "experience in FPLs, like Haskell, Clojure, Erlang or Scala". I had over 200 applications, of which less than 5% were people we'd consider working with (mostly "Greetings! I believe my extensive experience and considerable skills make me an ideal fit for your company."). Every ad thereafter has been in Haskell, and on average over half the applicants are good enough to be hired (which is a great situation to be in as an employer, although I feel bad for the Haskellers meeting so few opportunities). The community's quality is simply exceptional. I'll post more about its use, which is rapidly expanding beyond "data science", in a few weeks. If anybody is interested: http://www.haskellers.com/jobs/61 Best, Corentin Le samedi 21 décembre 2013 05:59:30 UTC, Jesse Armand a écrit :
Hi Paul,
A follow-up from the meetup. I was tired yesterday after work. So, didn't have the energy to socialize.
Just a few of my thoughts. First of all, it was a good start to promote haskell in Singapore.
I'm very new to Haskell. I did some ruby, python and node.js at a very small scale before. Most of time I do Objective-C programming as a job.
Just finished reading Higher Order Functions, and will start learning about making my own typeclasses. This is based on http://learnyouahaskell.com. So, I barely know anything about the language. Though, I'm aware that its popularity is growing, and also the existence of a haskell web framework such as Yesod.
So, for this reason, I am curious about how Zalora decided to choose Haskell as a programming language. Given that, there are very few people who know the language. It will also be great to understand where is it being used on the technology stack, and some examples of how Haskell is really advantageous for a particular use case.
Thanks
On Wednesday, December 18, 2013 6:12:52 PM UTC+8, Paul Meng wrote:
Hi all,
I've already posted on the reddit but forgot to post it here.
It's going to be Christmas, and a good way to celebrate it is to have a Haskell meetup. On this Friday, Dec 20. We are going to host it at Google Singapore office. http://www.meetup.com/HASKELL-SG/events/154702892/ There would be a short sharing and have some time to meet with other Haskell programmers (or FP programmer in general) after the talk. If you happen to be in Singapore, welcome to stop by!
For people signed up before, notice that we are moving from Zalora to Google's office to have a bigger meeting room. And due to the access policy, please fill out your full name, e-mail and company in the following form.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1pTQA3eK7Qsxbq_Tw8nPPX6MIUnQuGsm23rT5bfhtw-8...
Paul Meng