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

[Gracjan Polak]

Haisheng Wu <freizl <at> gmail.com> writes:

> 
> 
> Turns out that those guys doing start-up with Haskell are already expert
> at Haskell. Hence choosing Haskell is more straightforward.

We hope to become experts while doing Haskell.

> I'm thinking of using Haskell since it looks cool and beautiful.

Sense of internal taste is very important in engineering. And this is true
whatever language you choose.

> However I have little experience and will move slowly at certain
> begging period. This sounds not good to a startup company.
> 
> Comparing with Django in Python, Rails in Ruby, yesod and snap looks
> not that mature.

Add whole Hackage to the list an suddenly Haskell looks on par with most of
other things out there. 

> 
> Also, for instance, I'd like to build up a CRM application company, I
could leverage some open source projects in other languages.  In Haskell, we
need to build from scratch basically.

And that may be of course downside. If you happen do to what most other people
are doing out there, then using premade components is good option.

> Appreciate your suggestions/comments.

There was a reason 37signals decided to go with unknown little language and
create Rails from scratch. There was a reason Paul G. started viaweb in Lisp.
There was a reason that Apple things are programmed in Objective C instead of
plain C or plain Smalltalk. There was a reason that made Larry create perl
instead of sticking to awk+sed.

Of course you are to decide how much of these reasons apply to your situation.

Good luck anyway!

-- 
Gracjan