[Haskell-cafe] Requesting Feedback: I Love Haskell, but can't find a place to use it

[Michael Oswald]

> So anyway I'd like to request feedback: where can I use Haskell besides
> simple CLI utilities, dull server code, or project Euler problems? Even
> if it's just to contribute to getting Haskell in the environments
> mentioned above, any feedback is welcome!

Well I have used it for some not-so-typical Haskell tasks:

- An installer (command line) for some other software in C++ (unpacking,
installing COTS libraries, installing and setting up MySQL on different
machines including replication, setting up and installing the software
and also apply updates to it)
- A satellite simulator for testing mission control systems. It's very
basic but it can handle telecommands and arbitrary telemetry (definable
with a DSL which is loaded and interpreted at runtime), as well as basic
ground station routing messages, on-board queue simulation, on-board
software upload/download simulation and also some statistics about sent
telecommands. I actually used it for some telecommand performance
measurements for a real mission control system for an existing satellite
(which it simulated) as well as on debugging actions on the MCS. For me
the main point was to see if I could implement this functionality in
Haskell (there are other test-sims in C++ but with less functionality
and still a lot bigger in LOC). Due to the imperative nature and my
(ahem) limited abilities in Haskell the code is in parts very ugly, but
it grows and is refactored if I need new features. Currently if I have
time I am working on a GUI for it (otherwise it's just command line).
- Various test programs to stimulate servers with input. Especially
encoding/decoding of various (binary) protocols is far much easier and
faster to write in Haskell.
- Various conversion tools. E.g. currently I have a tool in the pipe
(just in the beginning stage) to convert something like CSV output into
a OpenOffice Calc spreadsheet for further processing/graphing/whatever.
Also I'd like to have a kind of OpenDocument library to be able to
generate reports, so this is the next step then. Due to my very limited
time in the moment this is currently stalled.


For me it would also be quite interesting to have a working CORBA
implementation with Haskell (as we have some applications at work which
use it), but I seem to be the only one.


lg,
Michael