[Haskell-cafe] killer app sought

[Mark Wotton]

Hi,

I've been writing a little binding from Ruby to Haskell called Hubris (http://github.com/mwotton/Hubris 
) which I think has some potential both for making Haskell web apps  
easier to write, and also for bringing the more adventurous Ruby  
programmers into the Haskell community. Code-wise it's coming along  
nicely, and once 6.12 is out it'll run without modifications at least  
on Linux (remains to be seen how long it'll take to get the Mac  
patches into shape). My real problem is marketing: I need a killer app  
that shows it's easy either to

1. wrap a kickarse Haskell library in a convenient Ruby web app shell
2. speed up a poorly performing Ruby web app

I've been badgering the Ruby guys in Sydney that I know on the second  
point, but either none of them have performance problems, or none of  
them want to admit it. The first is entirely possible - if you only  
attack the subset of problems where your runtime is dominated by the  
database and network latency, language performance is moot.  
Conversely, if that's your worldview, the other problems that could be  
attacked won't ever come to mind (to monstrously abuse the Sapir-Whorf  
hypothesis).

So, I'm asking you guys. What are some really nice Haskell libraries  
or apps that could benefit from being shown off in one of the plethora  
of slick, mature web frameworks that exist in Ruby? Manuel Chakravarty  
suggested something with vector operations in order to take advantage  
of his 'accelerate' library (once it gets a GPU backend, of course),  
and more generally, something taking advantage of Haskell's support  
for multicore would be cool. (The standard edition of Ruby is still  
unicore, I believe.)

Parenthetically yours,
Mark