Re: [Haskell-cafe] How hard is it to start a web startup using Haskell?

A good compromise might be opa (not used it myself, but I've been reading up on it as a possible candidate for any personal web projects I might want to do). It is not haskell, but it is ML-derived, and specifically for webapps. It has some example apps available, though nothing near the volume of apps rails or django would have. martin On Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 6:17 PM, Haisheng Wu wrote:

Turns out that those guys doing start-up with Haskell are already expert at Haskell. Hence choosing Haskell is more straightforward.

I'm thinking of using Haskell since it looks cool and beautiful. However I have little experience and will move slowly at certain begging period. This sounds not good to a startup company.

Comparing with Django in Python, Rails in Ruby, yesod and snap looks not that mature. Also, for instance, I'd like to build up a CRM application company, I could leverage some open source projects in other languages.  In Haskell, we need to build from scratch basically.

Appreciate your suggestions/comments.

-Simon

On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 2:30 AM, David Pollak wrote:

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On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 2:36 PM, Yves Parès wrote:

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Haskell is a mature platform that provides lots of goodies that I might otherwise have to write (like the goodies I wrote in Lift including an Actors library)

I don't get it: Actors are at the core of Scala concurrency model,

Actors as implemented in the Scala distribution were (and probably still are) horrid.  They have poor performance, memory retention issues, and an overall poor design.  When Lift relied on Scala's Actors, a Lift-comet site needed to be restarted every few weeks because of pent-up memory issues.  On the other hand, with Lift Actors, http://demo.liftweb.net has been running since July 7th.

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and are expanded for distributed programming through Akka for instance.

Actually, no.  Scala's Actors are not expanded by Akka (although Akka Actors may replace the existing Actor implementation in the Scala library).  Akka is yet another replacement for Scala's Actor library and Akka's distributed capabilities are weak and brittle.  Also, Lift's Actor library and Martin Odersky's flames about it paved the way for Akka because I took the heat that might have driven Jonas out of the Scala community when Akka was a small project.

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To me it'd be the other way around: you'd have to develop Actors in Haskell, don't you?

I've come to understand that Actors are a weak concurrency/distribution paradigm.  Anything that has a type signature Any => Unit is not composable and will lead to the same kinds of issues that we're looking for the compiler in Haskell to help us with (put another way, if you like Smalltalk and Ruby, then Actors seem pretty cool.)

On the other hand, many of Haskell's libraries (STM, Iteratees, etc.) have a much more composable set of concurrency primitives.

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Or maybe you don't mean the same thing by 'Actor'?

2011/12/19 David Pollak

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On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 2:04 AM, Ivan Perez wrote:

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I'm actually trying to make a list of companies and people using Haskell for for-profit real world software development.

I'd like to know the names of those startups, if possible.

I am building http://visi.pro on Haskell.  I am doing it for a number of reasons:

Haskell is a mature platform that provides lots of goodies that I might otherwise have to write (like the goodies I wrote in Lift including an Actors library) Haskell allows a lot of nice "things" that make building a language and associated tools easier (like laziness) Haskell is a filter for team members. Just like Foursquare uses Scala as a filter for candidates in recruiting, I'm using Haskell as a filter... if you have some good Haskell open source code, it's a way to indicate to me that you're a strong developer.

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-- Ivan

On 18 December 2011 18:42, Michael Snoyman wrote:

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On Sun, Dec 18, 2011 at 6:57 PM, Gracjan Polak wrote: > > Hi all, > > The question 'How hard is it to start a technical startup with > Haskell?' > happened a couple of times on this list. Sometimes it was in the > form 'How hard > is to find Haskell programmers?' or 'Are there any Haskell jobs?'. > > I'd like to provide one data point as an answer: > > > http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/ngbbp/haskell_only_esigning_startup... > > Full disclosure: I'm one of two that founded this startup. > > How are others doing businesses using Haskell doing these days?

I don't run a startup myself, but I know of at least three startups using Haskell for web development (through Yesod), and my company is basing its new web products on Yesod as well. I think there are plenty of highly qualified Haskell programmers out there, especially if you're willing to let someone work remotely.

Michael

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