Not mentioned in the update is that the Haskell Foundation is moving towards a model that already exists within the OCaml Foundation. The HF and OF have the same challenge: a shallow pool of (relatively) large sponsors.
Of course big successful firms have more money to contribute, and we are thankful for them. This move, whereby the HF will deploy more of its financial resources on technical challenges directly, is meant to attract the other 99.9% of firms using Haskell in production. Many firms, including my own employer, have a more tit-for-tat view of sponsorship.
If you have thoughts, or would like to get involved, do not hesitate to reach out to me! E-mail in bio
I have not played around with it to see how that plays out with agentic coding. But it does seem like an interesting idea.
- the tooling is decades behind, say, Rust or Go
- finding the right library in looks very different in Haskell--you frequently start with the signature on Hoogle. Agents can learn this but it's not the same as "web search"
- creating the right solution also looks different. It's usually borne out of thinking about the types and coming up with the correct algebra. Again models can probably learn to create the right types and orient the solution around that, but it's not automatic
- same today as yesterday, laziness is a blessing and a curse. The runtime can do unpredictable things when you suddenly evaluate a deep thunk
- GHC directives effectively mean there are multiple "Haskells"
Some of those are a result of the "avoid success at all costs" mantra. You can't shake that off in a day. It will take a concerted effort to make it more amenable for seamless adoption.
Haskell continues to be my favorite language to write and read, but Rust is the more practical language with a rich type system. If you're looking for something approaching Haskell's expressiveness but with fewer of these issues, check out PureScript.
Laziness is hard to observe, maybe Strict and StrictData would become more popular in use within this context.
I haven't checked in a while now if effects have become the norm in the ecosystem, or if some solution exists for "string" types, but for me all of Haskell's expressivity is lost in the noise of endless conversion function, wrapper types when stacking monads, and import fiddling.
To make this possible, the Haskell Foundation will remain without an executive director for the foreseeable future.
Instead of having a full-time employee in charge of fundraising, events, coordination, mediation and much more, we will split these responsibilities between the Board and a new, part-time role dedicated to the Haskell Foundation’s financial sustainability."
Sounds a great move in principle.
Source, seen it play out in a non-technical nonprofit that after years of stagnation, went the other way of hiring executive staff to run the day to day stuff. And from currently being part of another organization that is flailing that way presently.
Slow build times, deployment to Linux when developing on macos still pain. Deployment is pain specially on commodity VPS.
Go is very easy to cross compile and deploy.
But Haskell is better for a few things, but I've hardtime deploying it
Oh? Why is that?
Our metrics are also showing that Haskell usage is actually growing. So overall, can't complain!
Are people targeting it as a runtime for Haskell as well?
The thing that's so elegant about Haskell is that it allows you to express programmatic constructs at a very abstract level. Abstraction is almost by definition difficult to grasp. That's why it takes a decade and a half for (most) people to go from arithmetic to calculus.
