Friend of mine is always trying to convert me. Asked me to read this yesterday evening. This is my take on the article:

Most of my daily job goes into gluing services (API endpoints to databases or other services, some business logic in the middle). I don't need to see yet another exposition of how to do algorithmic tasks. Haven't seen one of those since doing my BSc. Show me the tools available to write a daemon, an http server, API endpoints, ORM-type things and you will have provided me with tools to tackle what I do. I'll never write a binary tree or search or a linked list at work.

If you want to convince me, show me what I need to know to do what I do.

I use

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/optparse-applicative for small cli apps

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/envparse For any Docker microservice

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/aeson-1.4.5.0/docs/Data-A... For all JSON work. Sometimes I’ll use it with lenses which is massively powerful but a rabbit hole

I’ll use http://hackage.haskell.org/package/stm when dealing with parallel execution

https://github.com/brendanhay/amazonka For anything dealing with AWS

https://github.com/haskell-works?tab=repositories Projects for Kafka and avro

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/warp For trivial micro services or Scotty if more than a few endpoints

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/persistent For dealing with Postgres

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/parsec For dealing with any text parsing.

The tools are available, they can make things like cli apps and micro services trivial. However if you have never used a ML language before you will have a steep learning curve as very different to C style/based languages.

I was once of the opinion Haskell is academic, what can you use it for in the real world. Then I studied with it, played with it admittedly on and off over 1-2 years, hit hurdles where I had to think as so different to what I’ve learnt before. Eventually it clicked, it’s very hard and frustrating now in my day job using typical enterprise or popular languages. It’s not about convincing, it’s about having a open mind and wanting to learn something different