<story><title>How to Sell Excellence</title><url>https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1a4GvI0dbL8sfAlnTUwVxhq4_j-QiDlz02_t0XZJXnzY/preview?sle=true&amp;slide=id.p</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>amazing_jose</author><text>I loved Haskell, seriously!&lt;p&gt;The year was 1997 and my uni professor was contributing to Hugs (do you remember it?). But, while I was working my way through Monads and stuff other people were running circles around me in C or C++. The basics were &amp;quot;simple&amp;quot; (even for basic C++) and they concentrated in getting things done.&lt;p&gt;Years later I launched my first start-up idea on Common Lisp. In both situation I learnt two hard truths:&lt;p&gt;a) libraries and support are very important&lt;p&gt;b) Architecture + basics &amp;gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; any particular technology&lt;p&gt;Now we are in 2015 (nearly 20 years later) and Haskell has advanced as much as Common Lisp on regards of usefulness for the general business. People still consider them elite (or 1337!) languages for showing off, meanwhile the rest of the world (with its mediocre programmers and tools) are running circles again. Programs now are distributed around dozens, hundreds or thousands of machines. Latency, networks, deployments, services, data communication,...&lt;p&gt;In the end I selected Python as my main programming language, following Norvig&amp;#x27;s advice that Python made for a good replacement for Lisp. I don&amp;#x27;t regret my decision not even a bit. Python paid&amp;#x2F;pays my bills. Yet, from time to time I read this posts and presentations and I feel a bit of envy for not being in a position where I could say «I reject your reality and substitute my own» and use Haskell or Common Lisp for main infrastructure to have the 1337 feeling again... like when I use obscure operative systems and end up in fruitless battles over how they are better even taking into account the lack of mainstream adoption (I&amp;#x27;m staring at you Haiku-os!).</text></comment>
<story><title>How to Sell Excellence</title><url>https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1a4GvI0dbL8sfAlnTUwVxhq4_j-QiDlz02_t0XZJXnzY/preview?sle=true&amp;slide=id.p</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ryandvm</author><text>At the risk of sounding inflammatory... I would be willing to believe that purely functional languages are the &amp;quot;one true way&amp;quot; if there were even the slightest bit of empirical evidence to support it. But where are all the successful large scale projects built with Haskell (or Clojure or whatever)?&lt;p&gt;The biggest FP project I was aware of was Twitter using Scala and they ended up completely backing away from it. Yikes.&lt;p&gt;The only other popular site that springs to mind is Hacker News, and frankly, it sucks. It&amp;#x27;s practically the Hello World of discussion forums.&lt;p&gt;The truth is, at the end of the day almost everything is being built with Java, Python, Ruby, or JavaScript. Can you really blame the product owners for being wary of writing their whole product in a functional language?</text></comment>