[Haskell-cafe] Haskell not ready for Foo [was: Re: Hypothetical Haskell job in New York]

[John Goerzen]

On Thu, Jan 08, 2009 at 10:36:32AM -0700, John A. De Goes wrote:
>
> The number of applications requiring the implementation of a custom web 
> server is an insignificant fraction of the number of applications  
> requiring a messaging system. I don't think anyone would dispute  
> Haskell's ability to do low-level, raw networking, of the type that few 
> people actually need to do. It's the higher level stuff where there's a 
> huge amount of room for improvement.

I disagree on both points.

Haskell has had somewhat of a deficit in the low-level networking
stuff, not even supporting IPv6 in the standard stack until just
recently.  (That is, things like AF_INET6 were not present.)

I think it has pretty much caught up by now though.

On the other hand, I see nothing in Haskell that would prevent its use
for any of your purposes.  There are numerous high-level web
infrastructures already.  Perhaps they are more or less suited to your
needs, but that's a library issue, not a language issue.  Saying "WASH
sucks" or "Happs sucks" is like saying "rails sucks".  May or may not
be true, but it doesn't imply anything about whether Haskell is suited
to that problem domain.  And much as I detest Rails, it doesn't
necessarily mean that Ruby *must* suck for web apps.

-- John