[Haskell-cafe] Scala at position 25 of the Tiobe index, Haskell dropped

[Michal Antkiewicz]

I would not worry too much about rankings like that.

What Haskell community should worry about is producing nice empirical
software engineering research about usage of Haskell in practice,
especially about development vs. maintenance cost for long term projects.
It's easy to "learn" and develop something in JavaScript/Python/Java etc.
It's much harder to evolve the software when there's sparse documentation
and after team members leave (which is the most common situation). I'd say
that compared to Haskell, JavaScript and Python codebases are
"unmaintainable" in the long term. It's like walking on a mine field,
pretty much.

I know that doing such studies is very costly but some quantitative
evidence should trickle down from the field.

I have one anecdotal story to tell. I was doing a very extensive change in
my project. It was huge. I approached a change a few times, trying to
minimize it but as I was performing the change I was learning a lot about
the codebase (I am a maintainer, other people wrote it) with the help of
the compiler. You try it and you see the impact. Finally, I found a good
way and implemented the change. Once I got it to compile again, one test
case failed. I quickly identified the bug I introduced during the change
and fixed it in 10min or so. After that, all my test suites and regression
tests passed. All that without going through lots of manual
testing/debugging/etc. Since then, no new bugs related to that huge change
were found.

That is the kind of power Haskell provides and we need more stories like
that.

Cheers,
Michal



On Fri, Apr 17, 2015 at 9:44 AM, David McBride <toad3k at gmail.com> wrote:

> I wouldn't put much stock in tiobe.  They change their algorithm regularly
> and they apparently did something drastic this month.
>
> As for haskell, I have never seen as many job offers for haskell
> developers as I have seen in the last few months.  I do think scala is more
> popular than haskell in industry, but not by as much as tiobe seems to
> think at this particular moment.
>
> On Fri, Apr 17, 2015 at 9:21 AM, Gregory Guthrie <guthrie at mum.edu> wrote:
>
>> I find that Haskell has a very different learning curve from other
>> languages that I use/know/have-tried, in that the basic language itself is
>> very simple and easy to learn and appreciate. However once one starts using
>> a lot of monads and applicatives and other libraries, it can begin to look
>> more like APL.
>>
>>    >>>                     parser >>= >>>  ( \s -> return ( pl' {
>> P.payloadData = setField pld (Just s) } } ) )
>>
>> Certainly one can learn to parse and read this, but with all of the new
>> operators and thus syntax not familiar to standard IP language users.
>> (Not a complaint, just an observation from teaching this to students new
>> to FP.)
>>
>> And in my experience the cabal problems are the "fatal-flaw"; it is not
>> infrequent that I have had to delete all libraries and start over, and I
>> have only very simple usage. I would not want to have a business project
>> that depended on this, as often I have not found a good solution where I
>> could install all the packages I wanted. (Perhaps I just need to learn more
>> about sandboxing techniques.)
>>
>> I am not a fan of the Scala syntax, but it does seem to be an easier
>> transition because it look-and-feel's more like the typical IPs.
>>
>> -------------------------------------------
>> > -----Original Message-----
>>  ...
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>
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