Is Haskell mature enough for web applications? [closed]

Answer 1

Now, it is no doubt that haskell can be used for commercial web development as demonstrated by
the company janrain, who is using the web framework snap.

It might be interesting to note that the first version of haskell (haskell 1.0) was released in 1990! And looking at how haskell was then and how it is now one can surely say that there has been a lot of "cooking".

Answer 2

If you're talking about web app development then the language you choose is only as mature as the libraries written around it for web development.

Answer 3

There are a number of Haskell libraries for developing websites (Happstack, Kibro, Hack, Salvia, Turbinado); the problem is that it's hard to know which ones are good. Many of these libraries are quite young. I expect that the situation will become better in the next couple of years as these libraries mature, and become clearer as these libraries become better documented.

In the meantime, I would say that Haskell is a fine language for writing web applications, provided that you are willing to spend some time getting to know the libraries and perhaps improving them when they fall short of your needs.

Answer 4

If you're going for web development I suggest you take a really deep look into the inside of JavaScript.
Javascript is a dynamic, weakly typed, prototype-based language with first-class functions.
It has many functional capeabilities and you can use either V8, TraceMonkey or the Windows Shell (but it runs JScript) to run it on none-browser enviorments.

Answer 5

If you think in the long term as well as the short term, Haskell is the best option. It has many different web developments, but there are a lot of commonalities in them, for example all the frameworks use applicative functors for form creation, and the libraries are interchangeable . So if you learn a framework it is easy to change to other since basically the database interface, rendering etc techniques/libraries are the same most of the time. On the other side, there are many things to learn form Haskell even if you decide to change to other language. You will benefit from it. So definitively Haskell is worth to learn.

Thinking as an investment on the future, but perhaps not for doing something terribly critical now, I think that procedural frameworks (either continuation-based or not) are the future of web development, since they are less complex and the code is much more maintainable and intuitive. Examples are: ocsigen (ocaml), seaside (smalltalk), coccoon (javascript), and my own: mflow written in Haskell.

Have you ever seen a three page Web application in a tweet? https://twitter.com/AGoCorona/status/329648864082677760

Answer 6

Check out jinjing's code: http://github.com/nfjinjing/loli/tree/master Yes, it's still experimental. But it opens your eyes a bit.

Haskell itself is certainly cooked enough. People who don't trust Java use Haskell (see http://www.galois.com) when they need to protect the Government's data.

But Haskell's web frameworks leave something to be desired. So it may not be the most productive environment at the moment. But ... if you master it, untold power will be yours :)