Taking a step back

[Gregory Collins]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2015 at 7:45 AM, Jeremy <voldermort at hotmail.com> wrote:

> I'm interested in why you think recent changes are making Haskell a less
> viable alternative to mainstream languages.
>

I don't want to put words in Johan's mouth, but we visited together last
week and discussed this very topic, and I think my feelings on the matter
are pretty similar.

For the sake of argument, let's assume I'm a potential commercial user who
needs to decide whether Haskell is a technology I can base my next product
on. I'm going to do a cost-benefit analysis before I make my decision. The
major "pro" arguments you hear for using Haskell is that you'll end up with
programs that are more likely to be correct, and that since the language is
more expressive, you'll work faster: in other words, your net productivity
will increase. Of course, these hypothetical productivity benefits are
extremely difficult to quantify (and Lord knows, we've tried), but that's
not at all true for the "con" arguments:

   - how many Haskell programmers are there in industry? If I lose my local
   expert who is trying to push us to use this thing, can I hire another?
   - how many lines of code are written in Haskell globally vs other
   languages?
   - how much tooling will I have available to help me if I choose Haskell
   vs. a "safer" technology like Java, Python, or Go?
   - how many open source libraries will I have available to me to handle
   common tasks, and what is their quality?
   - how likely am I to encounter bugs in the compiler or base libraries?

The point Johan is trying to make is this: if I'm thinking of using
Haskell, then I'm taking on a lot of project risk to get a (hypothetical,
difficult to quantify) X% productivity benefit. If choosing it actually
*costs* me a (real, obvious, easy to quantify) Y% tax because I have to
invest K hours every other quarter fixing all my programs to cope with
random/spurious changes in the ecosystem and base libraries, then unless we
can clearly convince people that X >> Y, the rationale for choosing to use
it is degraded or even nullified altogether.

G
-- 
Gregory Collins <greg at gregorycollins.net>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/libraries/attachments/20151020/19e33223/attachment-0001.html>