[Haskell] Haskell in industry?

[Heribert.Schuetz.extern at HVB.de]

Hello,

I am currently working on the redesign of some software system that has been
developed in-house at a bank. To get a proof-of-principle implementation up
and running quickly, I decided to use a high-level programming language. I
returned to Haskell, which I used a few years ago in an academic
environment. It turned out that Haskell really allowed me to implement
something quite powerful in relatively short time.

Meanwhile I am quite convinced that Haskell might not only be the right
choice for a prototype, but also for the "real thing". But inevitably some
people around here are scared about about the risks of using a
non-mainstream programming language, and to some degree I understand them.
The questions they are asking include:

*	Are there any references for using Haskell in industry? (I have
looked at the Haskell-in-Practice page on haskell.org, but there I can't see
how seriously all these applications are being used. For some of them it is
immediately clear that they are academic or toy applications. But others
might actually be used in production. I would be particularly interested in
customer-specific software projects that have used Haskell.)

*	Can Haskell code be integrated with .NET, in case the department
should decide to base more of its software on this platform? (I have found
Sigbjorn Finne's integration of Hugs with .NET, but I would prefer the
native-code compilation of GHC. I remember rumors about such a project years
ago when Simon PJ went to Microsoft, but didn't find anything recent about
this on the Web. I found notes about the GHC/.NET integration in the
Mondrian project, but that appears to be unmaintained. Correct me if I am
wrong.)

*	Will Haskell programmers be available 5 years from now to do the
rather boring work of maintaining a then-legacy system? (Well, here I don't
expect definitive answers. I just mentioned it here to give you a more
complete picture. Unfortunately there was not much response to Jochen
Leidner's message from September 2. BTW, with "then-legacy system" )

*	Can't much of the simplicity of the Haskell code also be reached by
just switching from C++ to something like Java or C#? (Probably an example
from the application domain will be most convincing. So I probably have to
bite the bullet and reimplement some code in Java or C#. But if you have
some examples, they might be helpful. The quicksort example in
http://www.haskell.org/complex/why_does_haskell_matter.html is unfortunately
Haskell vs. C++.)

I would be grateful for your hints,

Heribert.


PS: If I get permission from the bank, I will be happy to report in more
detail about the project, which is an interesting Haskell application of its
own.