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

[David Pollak]

On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 2:36 PM, Yves Parès <limestrael at gmail.com> wrote:

> > 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.


> 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.


> 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.


> Or maybe you don't mean the same thing by 'Actor'?
>
>
> 2011/12/19 David Pollak <feeder.of.the.bears at gmail.com>
>
>> On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 2:04 AM, Ivan Perez <ivanperezdominguez at gmail.com
>> > wrote:
>>
>>> 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.
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>> -- Ivan
>>>
>>> On 18 December 2011 18:42, Michael Snoyman <michael at snoyman.com> wrote:
>>> > On Sun, Dec 18, 2011 at 6:57 PM, Gracjan Polak <gracjanpolak at gmail.com>
>>> 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_closes_second_angel/
>>> >>
>>> >> 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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>>>
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>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Visi.Pro, Cloud Computing for the Rest of Us http://visi.pro
>> Lift, the simply functional web framework http://liftweb.net
>> Follow me: http://twitter.com/dpp
>> Blog: http://goodstuff.im
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>


-- 
Visi.Pro, Cloud Computing for the Rest of Us http://visi.pro
Lift, the simply functional web framework http://liftweb.net
Follow me: http://twitter.com/dpp
Blog: http://goodstuff.im
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