Hello haskellers, I have been following this list's debates for a while and I am very enthusiastic about functional programming in general and haskell in particular. I am on the verge of starting a new sofware development project for a customer and I wonder whether or not Haskell would be the right tool to do the job. The project is a Point-of-sale distributed management system with the following (non-exhaustive) list of features : - rich GUI clients (on windows platform) to allow optimizing users input speed. There will about 50-60 'screens' and half as many 'reports', - local database with possibility to replicate and aggregate data, - central repository for aggregated data, aggregation should be synchronous but may fail due to poor network connectivity, - ease of deployment/update for new versions or modules, - secured (authenticated and encrypted) communications between nodes, - ... All in all, this project is quite typical of a small to medium sized business information system which is commonplace in software services. There are no stringent performance requirements nor extraordinary functional features or tricky algorithms, but the allocated time-frame (and money :-)) is quite small and I would like to optimize design and coding time to concentrate on user acceptance, deployment and testing issues. Java and object-oriented 'paradigm' is nearly hardwired in my brain so I expect quite a painful learning process to shift towards thinking in functional terms: I know quite well the theory but never did I put it to use on a significant scale. More profoundly, I am asking myself whether this investment will be really worthwhile for this kind of software. I have read with joy and amazement S.P.Jones "Composing contracts: an adventure in financial engineering" and P.Hudak's "An experiment in software prototyping productivity", but I have also followed the discussions with J.Reymont about its poker server tester and read "Haskell vs. Erlang, Reloaded". I am not asking anyone to 'sell' me Haskell, that would be like selling ice to a penguin as I am already convinced Haskell is really interesting in itself. And I am willing to do some investment in time and money to use Haskell at the expense of another simpler but less elegant solution (read Java :-)). I would be very happy to have some feedback about these issues, regards, -- Arnaud Bailly, Dr. - Ingénieur de Recherche NORSYS 1, rue de la Cense des Raines ZAC du Moulin 59710 ENNEVELIN Tel : (33) 3 28 76 56 76 Mob : (33) 6 17 12 19 78 Fax : (33) 3 28 76 57 00 Web : http://www.norsys.fr