On Mon, 12 May 2003, Shawn P. Garbett wrote:
I got into a discussion with folks in my local circle of computer heads. I was talking about what I liked about Haskell. Most of the local circle are sold on the idea that Perl is the best language ever written. They eventually challenged me: show us a web site that is being served by Haskell.
One concrete example: solutions to programming laboratories on my introductory programming course are submitted using a system implemented with Wash/CGI. Students log in to the system, register their lab group (they work in pairs), and then see a group home page via which they can upload solutions and see feedback from their tutor -- there are four different pages in this interface. Tutors have a similar interface where they see all submissions waiting for their comments, and I have an administrators interface where I can track the progress of the entire class, extract the list of students who passed, prepare submissions for automated cheat-detection, and so on. The entire system is about 650 lines of Haskell and took two or three days to write, the biggest problem being coping with the strange way our web server is configured! (The administrator's interface is a bit crudely implemented, since only I have to use it!) It was used by 170 students and eight tutors on my course alone, and has since been adopted for other courses. Performance is completely satisfactory, not surprisingly. The system replaced manual handing in, correction, and reporting of labs, and was a dramatic improvement. For obvious reasons the system isn't publicly available, but you can see how the student interface appears here: http://www.cs.chalmers.se/Cs/Grundutb/Kurser/d1pt/d1pta/submission/lab-submi... That's just one example of a fairly small but "real world" system implemented in Haskell with Wash/CGI. I'm sure there must be many others. John