> Haskell is mostly used for small, single-purpose tools, or it's used to teach FP principles.
According to whom? If you, how do you come to that conclusion?
> There just aren't that many people using Haskell for real projects, nor are there lots of practical libraries for it. (You're free to name some examples if you disagree...)
I could name many, though I'm not sure they would meet your definition of practical. Could you give me your definition of a practical library, and/or perhaps even better a few practical libraries from your language of choice?
> Perhaps worse, Haskell is hard to learn.
Haskell is no harder to learn than your first programming language where you also had to learn imperative programming semantics and things like Object Oriented programming.
> Sure your code is super-optimized for a compiler or whatever,
It really seems like you don't know much about Haskell. I think you'd be doing yourself a service to take a look.
> but the learning curve is so high that you have to find someone else that's experienced in Haskell to work on your project. That's very, very hard.
Not if you offer remote work and post it to /r/haskell, haskellers.com, and functionaljobs.com
Getting local candidates with previous Haskell experience could be more difficult outside of places like NYC, Austin, Silicon Valley, etc.
I wouldn't advise using it for a start-up unless you have at least one person that is moderately experienced and at the very least created a few libraries.
There are less than 5k Haskell users on Github, and they've released 30k repos.
By comparison, Go has 9k users and 50k repos. And a lot of people say that Go is not that useful of a language because the community is small.
What I'm saying isn't particularly controversial. There's a long thread here where Haskell is brought up frequently in the same context I'm talking about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8802454
My definition of practical is this: people use it in practice. They use it for business or for personal projects that other people get use out of.
The core purpose of software is to automate things that, otherwise, people would have to do. What large jobs is Haskell currently automating for people?
> By comparison, Go has 9k users and 50k repos. And a lot of people say that Go is not that useful of a language because the community is small.
Some people call Python too small. Some even claim "Haskell is mostly used for small, single-purpose tools, or it's used to teach FP principles". Some people say a lot of things, that doesn't make it true.
> My definition of practical is this: people use it in practice. They use it for business or for personal projects that other people get use out of.
I use Haskell for freelance clients currently.
> The core purpose of software is to automate things that, otherwise, people would have to do. What large jobs is Haskell currently automating for people?
Standard Chartered is particularly of note, as you can see in this quora question. You can also see other examples of Haskell automating jobs for people:
Nope.
> Haskell is mostly used for small, single-purpose tools, or it's used to teach FP principles.
According to whom? If you, how do you come to that conclusion?
> There just aren't that many people using Haskell for real projects, nor are there lots of practical libraries for it. (You're free to name some examples if you disagree...)
I could name many, though I'm not sure they would meet your definition of practical. Could you give me your definition of a practical library, and/or perhaps even better a few practical libraries from your language of choice?
> Perhaps worse, Haskell is hard to learn.
Haskell is no harder to learn than your first programming language where you also had to learn imperative programming semantics and things like Object Oriented programming.
> Sure your code is super-optimized for a compiler or whatever,
It really seems like you don't know much about Haskell. I think you'd be doing yourself a service to take a look.
> but the learning curve is so high that you have to find someone else that's experienced in Haskell to work on your project. That's very, very hard.
Not if you offer remote work and post it to /r/haskell, haskellers.com, and functionaljobs.com
Getting local candidates with previous Haskell experience could be more difficult outside of places like NYC, Austin, Silicon Valley, etc.
I wouldn't advise using it for a start-up unless you have at least one person that is moderately experienced and at the very least created a few libraries.