Haskell is a very interesting language, and shows up on sites like http://programming.reddit.com frequently. It’s somewhat mind-bending, but very powerful and has some great theoretical advantages over other languages. I have been learning it on and off for some time, never really getting comfortable with it but being inspired by it nonetheless.
But discussion on sites like reddit usually falls a little flat when someone asks a question like:
If haskell has all these wonderful advantages, what amazing applications have been written with it?
The responses to that question usually aren’t very convincing, quite honestly.
But what if I told you there was a wildly successful language, in some ways the most successful language ever, and it could be characterized by:
- lazy evaluation
- declarative
- type inference
- immutable state
- tightly controlled side effects
- strict static typing
Surely that would be interesting to a Haskell programmer? Of course, I’m talking about SQL.