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!
Well I have used it for some not-so-typical Haskell tasks: - An installer (command line) for some other software in C++ (unpacking, installing COTS libraries, installing and setting up MySQL on different machines including replication, setting up and installing the software and also apply updates to it) - A satellite simulator for testing mission control systems. It's very basic but it can handle telecommands and arbitrary telemetry (definable with a DSL which is loaded and interpreted at runtime), as well as basic ground station routing messages, on-board queue simulation, on-board software upload/download simulation and also some statistics about sent telecommands. I actually used it for some telecommand performance measurements for a real mission control system for an existing satellite (which it simulated) as well as on debugging actions on the MCS. For me the main point was to see if I could implement this functionality in Haskell (there are other test-sims in C++ but with less functionality and still a lot bigger in LOC). Due to the imperative nature and my (ahem) limited abilities in Haskell the code is in parts very ugly, but it grows and is refactored if I need new features. Currently if I have time I am working on a GUI for it (otherwise it's just command line). - Various test programs to stimulate servers with input. Especially encoding/decoding of various (binary) protocols is far much easier and faster to write in Haskell. - Various conversion tools. E.g. currently I have a tool in the pipe (just in the beginning stage) to convert something like CSV output into a OpenOffice Calc spreadsheet for further processing/graphing/whatever. Also I'd like to have a kind of OpenDocument library to be able to generate reports, so this is the next step then. Due to my very limited time in the moment this is currently stalled. For me it would also be quite interesting to have a working CORBA implementation with Haskell (as we have some applications at work which use it), but I seem to be the only one. lg, Michael