Ask HN: Why would anyone choose Haskell to develop applications?

And since the interview process is imprecise the point of being broken, it's very useful to attract the right people in the first place.

TBH if you are building something boring you should just use Spring w/Java or Kotlin. This will attract pragmatists that ship code that works in ways that anyone else that works with these tools will instantly understand also. In a way it attracts mediocrity but in the good way where you get nice standard code that can be maintained cheaply for a long time and it's easy to hire for the skillset.

If you are prototyping extremely quickly then maybe Ruby on Rails might be the right tool for the job (and thus attract the right kind of people).

Go attracts mediocrity and not in a good way, it also actively repels the "right " people if you want to hire for highest intellectual horsepower for a given budget.

In the same category as Haskell you also have OCaml, the Lisps (Clojure in particular) and Erlang all of which will yield you lots of the "right" people. None of these people will be cheap but none of the good people that write the other languages are cheap either, however there is a strong correlation between interest and proficiency in these languages and high intellectual horsepower - hence "right" in this context.

I worked on a Scala team for a couple years, had a lot of devs that were “smart”, problem was they wrote really fancy code no one could understand.

I then switched to a Go team and it was night and day. I was wildly more productive and the people in the community were not lacking intelligence.

Go prioritizes community, it believes that “us” is more impactful than “me”. This is its biggest strength, and is often lost on people looking in from the outside.

I am puzzled by this because my early experience of Ruby On Rails (and I mean early -- 2005) is that every Rails developer I encountered knew much less than they were letting on.

> Go attracts mediocrity and not in a good way, it also actively repels the "right " people if you want to hire for highest intellectual horsepower for a given budget.

I really think this needs backing up with at the very least a juicy horror story! I'm not convinced by this at all.

Yes, if you choose Haskell, a Lisp, or something like Erlang, you can get smarter/better devs. But the flip side of that is that the types of people who tend to gravitate toward those languages are often more interested in programming for it's own sake and not the domain they're working in. So you get things like people burning hours writing their own libraries and endless tinkering with programming minutiae instead of getting sh* done.

On the other hand, a mediocre programmer who taught themselves Python, may not be winning any programming competitions, but will often have significant domain expertise and a bias toward getting things done.

You need to ask yourself whether or not the stuff you're working on really demands the absolute best programmers (it very rarely does). If it does, go with the Erlang/Haskell/Lisp crew, otherwise go with the Python/JS/Go crew.

I much prefer the JVM and ASP.NET crew because they are 9-5 programmers, their tools aren't constantly changing so for the most part they only need to spend time actually doing work. No fighting with package managers, no updating the latest framework and solving backwards incompatibilities for weeks, no random runtime bugs and shitty native extensions that cause said runtime bugs or memory leaks outside of runtime level heap accounting, etc.

Boring tech is the way to go for 99% of problems and to me JS/Go/Python don't qualify because they break too much and require too many workarounds for too many problems. I want my programmers to be thinking about how to solve my business problem, not problems with their tools.

Genuine question: are these people a crew? I doubt very much each individual constituency in that trio would think so.

JS and Go are really very different things with different mindsets. Python vs JS likewise.

Except, you know, in the browser...

Functional programming allows a great deal of confidence in your code,

How "far "off" is it, in terms of correctness, compared to other, more conventional statically typed languages like C++ or Java or Rust?

As long as take advantage of the type system, the compiler tends to permit far fewer programs that compile, but do the wrong thing, than is the case in C++/Java. You will notice you spend more time editing code to make it compile, and less time debugging code that does compile.

Rust should not be grouped with C++ or Java, as its type system is essentially that of Haskell with the addition of lifetimes. The developer experience is similar in that you tend to spend more time getting code to compile, and less time debugging.

Actually ImplicitCAD is written in Haskell which implements CSG (very tricky to efficiently implement)