Experience Report: Haskell in the 'Real World' Writing a Commercial Application in a Lazy Functional Language

摘要

I describe the initial attempt of experienced business software developers with minimal functional programming background to write a non-trivial, business-critical application entirely in Haskell. Some parts of the application domain are well suited to a mathematically-oriented language; others are more typically done in languages such as C++. I discuss the advantages and difficulties of Haskell in these circumstances, with a particular focus on issues that commercial developers find important but that may receive less attention from the academic community. I conclude that, while academic implementations of "advanced" programming languages arguably may lag somewhat behind imple-mentations of commercial languages in certain ways important to businesses, this appears relatively easy to fix, and that the other ad-vantages that they offer make them a good, albeit long-term, invest-ment for companies where effective IT implementation can offer a crucial advantage to success.