Hiring and porting

[Mark Carroll]

Thanks, everyone, for your responses! It's all been very helpful. Some
things I should mention, then:

We're based in central Ohio, but are not currently hiring FPers. Whether
we will be in the future depends somewhat on this porting issue. However,
if we do decide to hire any Haskell programmers, I shall mention that
here.

Ideally, yes, we'd look to hire practising programmers who already know
Haskell and wish that they could be using it in their job, although I'd
fear that there may not be enough such people available to us.

The larger application is a simulation engine that involves parsing,
symbolic processing, etc. in which correctness in important and that will
require ongoing improvement and modification, so I was thinking that use
of Haskell would be appropriate. (Use of C++ would make it faster, though,
I expect. (-:)

However, I do fear that Ashley's correct in suggesting that you'd probably
need to rewrite everything to sensibly translate the Haskell to C or Java
or whatever, and it is both reasonable and plausible that some larger
clients will demand use of a more mainstream language in anything that we
deliver to them so that they don't rely on us for maintenance. So, first
we have to figure out if we should use Haskell at all, because a likely
need for a non-trivial port in the future could easily negate, in time and
cost, the initial productivity benefits we might gain from Haskell.

-- Mark