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yes, but I'd argue the "buy vs. build" balance is shifted too far to the build side right now when you build all your backend services (or most of them) with Haskell. In the Haskell ecosystem there's a good deal of solutionism, but this can be solved with diligent decision making and good technical leadership, the greater issue, IMO, is that Haskell lacks the breadth and depth of libraries that allow Haskell to be a low risk language choice that allows you to build a project, see how things go, then restart with a different team/assumptions if need be.

I want Haskell to win and solve these problems: I've invested years of my life learning the ecosystem and actively maintain open sources libraries, but after years of using the language and running into problems, I've lived through the situations when Haskell is less than stellar as a software engineering tool and it's quite disappointing to see.




I think the only solution here is to dump a war chest of cash into the ecosystem.

One the reasons Java and C++ are incumbents is due to the network effects that made them what they are today. Oracle literally spent hundreds of millions of dollars convincing developers Java was the next big thing. C++ enjoyed platform support by being compatible with C and was embraced by big players with deep pockets.

Haskell doesn’t have a shot at becoming “a safe choice” in that regard. It's not an exclusive language to a desire-able platform, it doesn't have an organization with deep pockets to fund its development, it doesn't have a killer application.

But it is an oracle for the future of where programming is headed. Many languages are trying their best to steal ideas from Haskell/FP: immutable data structures, pattern matching, lambda functions, lack of null, constrained parametric polymorphism, etc; patterns from libraries like monads, streams, lenses, functors; all making their way into Java, C#, etc.

That being said I haven’t felt that the ecosystem is lacking core libraries for almost anything I’ve been working on. The IDE support is still lacking and profiling tools are there but lacking shiny DUX. Otherwise I can’t really complain.




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