My colleague Andy recently wrote about what it's like to use Haskell at IMVU. Since then, I've started writing some Haskell, and I wanted to share my thoughts on the language and ecosystem.

I am by no means a language expert. But I've gotten over the beginner's hump and have written a fair amount of real code, so I have a decent sense of what the idioms are.

Haskell is Awesome

Overall, I find Haskell to be great. It's not that fun to write -- the common complaint that Haskell makes you think a lot up front is totally true -- but once the code is written it is so easy to safely refactor. This is likely due to type inference, Haskell's brevity, and the ease of creating new, lightweight types. At the technology strategy level, I value long-term maintainability and evolvability over ease of writing new code, so Haskell has a big advantage here.

With Warp and Wai, Haskell is particularly excellent for writing HTTP services. (Michael Snoyman generally has solid design taste and performance sense.) In just a few lines of code, you can write a scalable, concurrent, low-latency HTTP server. Better yet, you can deploy this HTTP server to your production servers as a static binary: no fancy configuration or package management necessary!

The GHC runtime is both innovative and mature. It has excellent concurrency support. With STM, avoiding deadlocks in concurrent algorithm is easy. Green threads and sparks enable spinning off hundreds of thousands of lightweight jobs, soaking up any available CPU capacity. The parallel I/O manager makes it efficient to concurrently handle multiple requests in a single process.

GHC's benefits go beyond the language and runtime: with GHC's foreign function interface, it's easy to call into C functions from Haskell.

Enough about the runtime, let me discuss the language a bit.

When digging into an unfamiliar codebase, the hardest part is building an understanding of the possible states and data flows. That is, understanding the big picture. Sum types help a lot here. They explicitly denote the possible states. Pattern matching, plus warnings for partial matches, make sure that all states are properly handled, largely preventing any kind of accidental null pointer errors. (Remember: Maybe a is a sum type: Just a | Nothing.)

Haskell draws a sharp line between pure code and effectful code. This makes it much easier to understand how information flows through the code. When you see a pure function, you know it is only calculating a result, and thus only need to read the type signature to understand its effect. Also, separating pure and effectful code prevents a common class of performance regression: accidentally adding expensive I/O to otherwise pure data transformation code. (The compiler also benefits from knowledge of which functions are pure: it can evaluate in arbitrary order, lift common function calls to outer scopes, and apply rewrite rules.)

In addition, through custom Monad types, Haskell makes it easy to restrict effects to specific contexts. For example, you can enforce rules like "No MySQL queries in Redis transactions" or "No arbitrary I/O in HTTP request handlers, only specific restricted actions." By limiting your code to a restricted interface, it's even possible to guarantee that your unit tests will be deterministic. This is a real problem in languages like Python, C++, and JavaScript, where a single unmocked call to "get the current time" can make your tests intermittent.

Monads, in general, let you use the same syntax for imperative code, asynchronous code, code with automatic error handling. You don't need generators or new keywords to have convenient syntax for asynchronous programs. Monads and 'do sugar' by themselves are sufficient. See slide 121 and beyond in Scott Wlaschin's excellent Functional Design Patterns slides.

Type classes are awesome too! Traditional OO languages allow polymorphism through the first argument (this pointer, vtable). But type classes allow polymorphism on single values (see Data.Default) and across multiple arguments, even return values. See Eq.

Type classes can be created independently from their resident types. Types can be specified independently from type class implementations. This allows layering concepts into third-party libraries that weren't designed with them in mind.

Type classes are especially powerful when you start building application frameworks with them. For example, consider the type of HTTP request handlers:

myRequestHandler :: ToHTTPResponse a => HTTPRequest -> a

That is, a request handler is a function that takes an HTTP request and returns any value that can be converted to an HTTP response. This means request handlers don't themselves need to build the HTTP response: just return any compatible object and let the framework convert.

Haskell is Not Awesome

Haskell is not all roses. In fact, I'm not sure it can even become the Next Big Language. And for a rather sad, superficial reason: the syntax is a too idiosyncratic compared to every other mainstream language. I'm not talking about lets, operators, or separating functions from arguments by whitespace. Those things can be learned pretty quickly.

My biggest syntax problem with Haskell is that there is too much variety. I'm a strong believer in the Style is Substance thesis, which is that our precious brain cells and decision-making units shouldn't be spent on stylistic choices -- instead, we should all have a fairly consistent style and spend our energy on more important decisions.

Haskell, on the other hand, has WAY too many nerd knobs. You can use "let ... in ..." syntax, "expr ... where ..." syntax, do syntax (even in non-monadic contexts). You can write functions with explicit arguments or in point-free style.

In your own code, or even within an organization, you can define a coding style and aggressively follow it. But if Haskell syntax was as consistent and tight as, for example, Java or Python, it would have a better shot at being mainstream.

I have some other syntax nits too: the verbosity of module imports is annoying and some common libraries (Aeson) use too many custom operators.

Some extensions should definitely be promoted to the core language by now. String should basically never be used in production code (more on that later), and ByteString and Text aren't usable without the OverloadedStrings extension, which allows specifying ByteString and Text values with string literals. OverloadedLists should also be enabled. Really, any literal should be overloaded. It's very convenient to be able to use existing literal syntax to initialize values of many different types.

"ScopedTypeVariables simplifies real code. TupleSections are commonly-used. There's little risk in folding both into the core language. I feel like RecordWildCards should also be enabled by default, but records are a mess in Haskell and that part of the language is actively evolving. ExistentialQuantification is also critical in most real codebases.

Now let's talk about the Prelude. The Prelude probably made sense in the 80s and 90s when Haskell was a simple research language, but parts of it are showing its age. String should never be used in production code. A lazy linked list of 32-bit Unicode code points is... elegant? ... but pretty much the least efficient data structure for text. Sadly, a lot of underlying APIs in Haskell use String, just because it's standard and the original data type for text.

The Num typeclass is a mess. Just because a value can be added does not also mean it can be multiplied or has an absolute value or can be converted from a numeric program literal. Generally, type classes should be small and precise, and Num is none of those. The problems with Num are well-documented.

The Prelude in general should use more type classes. This is a point of contention within the Haskell community. My opinion, however, falls squarely on the "more polymorphic functions!" side of the argument. It really sucks to have to teach people about both map and fmap when they're the same function. It generally goes like this:

"What is fmap?"
"It's generalized map. It works on Maybe and Vector and HashMap."
"Why doesn't map work on those?"
"Well, some people in the community believe that type classes make learning harder, so the Prelude should stick to less general function definitions."

I haven't seen any actual human factors research that says type classes make learning the language harder. And you can't really learn Haskell without understanding type classes, so a monomorphic Prelude simply delays some education that is necessary anyway.

The C++ standard library is a good counterexample: you can use std::vector without understanding how to write templates. Python too. You can call len on any container without having to know how to implement the __len__ protocol. Haskell could have this same exact feature if people would stop inventing usability reasons not to. See Michael Snoyman's work on ClassyPrelude.

My coworker, Jonathan Fischoff, makes a similar point on Reddit.

This brings up a higher-level issue with the design of most Haskell APIs: little regard is paid to the number of symbols exposed. Ideal APIs are memorable and predictable. Once you know how to map across any collection, you should know how to map across all collections. Once you know how to calculate the length of a list, you should know how to calculate the length of a vector or map. In Haskell, today, you need separate functions for each of those (e.g. Prelude.length vs. Data.Vector.length vs. Data.HashMap.Strict.size). There is so much to remember that you need about six browser tabs open to get any useful work done.

In summary: type classes are an excellent language feature. But they're not used enough or well enough in the base Haskell libraries. And that's all I'll say on the subject for now. :)

Now I will discuss integrating with libraries.

I think it's time that certain libraries get promoted into the standard: ByteString, Data.Maybe, Data.Map, Data.Set, Data.Text. It's not realistic to write a real application without using them, so they should be made ubiquitous.

Finally, I have one more major complaint about the Haskell ecosystem. Fortunately, it's a solvable one. Cabal sucks. I don't know enough about it to say specifically why, but literally every time I come back to our build system after time away, something goes horribly wrong. I end up having to manually deleted generated files, or manually uninstall some packages. The error messages are always inscrutable. Sometimes I have to pull in one of the Cabal experts at the company and it's a coin flip as to whether they'll be able to figure it out.

I assume Cabal is fixable, but it's somewhat boggling to me that a community that thinks so much about precision and mathematical laws and reliability can produce a tool so flaky.

Haskell is Worth Using

That was a long list of complaints - longer than I spent on the upsides. :) But I want to be clear: I still think Haskell is pretty great. It's certainly worth learning. It's also a great platform for writing HTTP services. Unless someone with GvR-esque taste attacks the syntax, Prelude, and standard libraries with gusto, Haskell likely won't become as popular as Java or PHP or Python. Nonetheless, Haskell's on a rapid upward trajectory, and as the community becomes less academic and more practical, many of these problems will get addressed. Even if the community is slow to adapt, as with any language, you can define your own internal conventions and base libraries, including your own Prelude if desired.