What is Haskell used for in the real world

Question

There is a lot of hype around Haskell  however  it is hard to get information on how it is used in the real world applications  What are the most popular projects   usages of Haskell and why it excels at solving these problems

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I have a cool one  facebook created a automated tool for rewriting PHP code  They parse the source into an abstract syntax tree  do some transformations   if   f    false  - gt  if  false     f    I don t know why  but that seems to be their particular style and then they pretty print it   https   github com facebook lex-pass  We use haskell for making small domain specific languages  Huge amounts of data processing  Web development  Web spiders  Testing applications  Writing system administration scripts  Backend scripts  which communicate with other parties   Monitoring scripts  we have a DSL which works nicely together with munin  makes it much easier to write correct monitor code for your applications     All kind of stuff actually  It is just a everyday general purpose language with some very powerful and useful features  if you are somewhat mathematically inclined

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For example  for developing interactive  realtime HTML5 web applications  See Elm  the compiler of which is implemented in Haskell and the syntax of which borrows a lot from Haskell s

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This is a pretty good source for info about Haskell and its uses   Open Source Haskell Releases and Growth

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Haskell is a general purpose programming language  It can be used for anything you use any other language to do  You aren t limited by anything but your own imagination  As for what it s suited for  Well  pretty much everything  There are few tasks in which a functional language does not excel   And yes  I m the Rayne from Dreamincode      I would also like to mention that  in case you haven t read the Wikipedia page  functional programming is a paradigm like Object Oriented programming is a paradigm  Just in case you didn t know  Haskell is also functional in the sense that it works  it works quite well at that   Just because a language isn t an Object Oriented language doesn t mean the language is limited by anything  Haskell is a general-purpose programming language  and is just as general purpose as Java

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From the Haskell Wiki      Haskell has a diverse range of use   commercially  from aerospace and   defense  to finance  to web startups    hardware design firms and lawnmower   manufacturers  This page collects   resources on the industrial use of   Haskell    According to Wikipedia  the Haskell language was created out of the need to consolidate existing functional languages into a common one which could be used for future research in functional-language design   It is apparent based on the information available that it has outgrown it s original purpose and is used for much more than research   It is now considered a general purpose functional programming language   If you re still asking yourself   Why should I use it    then read the Why use it  section of the Haskell Wiki Introduction

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One example of Haskell in action is xmonad  a  featureful window manager in less than 1200 lines of code

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From Haskell      Haskell is a standardized  general-purpose purely functional   programming language  with   non-strict semantics and strong static   typing  It is named after logician   Haskell Curry    Basically Haskell can be used to create pretty much anything you would normally create using other general-purpose languages  e g  C   Java  C  C    etc

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What are some common uses for this   language    Rapid application development   If you want to know  why Haskell    then you need to consider advantages of functional programming languages  taken from https   c2 com cgi wiki AdvantagesOfFunctionalProgramming          Functional programs tend to be much more terse than their ImperativeLanguage counterparts  Often this leads to enhanced   programmer productivity   FP encourages quick prototyping  As such  I think it is the best software design paradigm for ExtremeProgrammers    but what do I know    FP is modular in the dimension of functionality  where ObjectOrientedProgramming is modular in the dimension of different   components    The ability to have your cake and eat it  Imagine you have a complex OO system processing messages - every component might make state   changes depending on the message and then forward the message to some   objects it has links to  Wouldn t it be just too cool to be able to   easily roll back every change if some object deep in the call   hierarchy decided the message is flawed  How about having a history of   different states    Many housekeeping tasks made for you  deconstructing data structures  PatternMatching   storing variable bindings  LexicalScope with   closures   strong typing  TypeInference   GarbageCollection  storage   allocation  whether to use boxed  pointer-to-value  or unboxed  value   directly  representation      Safe multithreading  Immutable data structures are not subject to data race conditions  and consequently don t have to be protected by   locks  If you are always allocating new objects  rather than   destructively manipulating existing ones  the locking can be hidden in   the allocation and GarbageCollection system       Apart from this Haskell has its own advantages such as     Clear  intuitive syntax inspired by mathematical notation  List comprehensions to create a list based on existing lists  Lambda expressions  create functions without giving them explicit names  So it s easier to handle big formulas  Haskell is completely referentially transparent  Any code that uses I O must be marked as such  This way  it encourages you to separate code with side effects  e g  putting text on the screen  from code without  calculations   Lazy evaluation is a really nice feature    Even if something would usually cause an error  it will still work as long as you don t use the result  For example  you could put 1   0 as the first item of a list and it will still work if you only used the second item  It is easier to write search programs such as this sudoku solver because it doesn t load every combination at once mdash it just generates them as it goes along  You can do this in other languages  but only Haskell does this by default     You can check out following links    https   c2 com cgi wiki AdvantagesOfFunctionalProgramming https   docs microsoft com archive blogs wesdyer why-functional-programming-is-important-in-a-mixed-environment https   web archive org web 20160626145828 http   blog kickino org archives 2007 05 22 T22 34 16  https   useless-factor blogspot com 2007 05 advantage-of-functional-programming html

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I think people in this post are missing the most important point for anyone who has never used a functional programming language   expanding your mind   If you are new to functional programming then Haskell will make you think in ways you ve never thought before   As a result your programming in other areas and other languages will improve   How much   Hard to quantify

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There is one good answer for what a general purpose language like Haskell is good for  writing programs in general   For what it is used for in practice  I ve three approaches to establishing that    A tag cloud of Haskell library and app areas  weighted by frequency on Hackage    Indicates that it is good for graphics  networking  systems programming  data structures  databases  development   text processing        Areas it is used in industry - a lot of DSLs  web apps  compiler design  networking  analysis  systems programming         And finally  my opinion on what it is really strong at    Problems where correctness matters  domain specific languages  and parallel and concurrent programming   I hope that gives you a sense on how broad your question is  if it is to be answered with any specificity

[haskell] What is Haskell used for in the real world?

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