How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Haskell

The web development world loves languages that are dynamically typed, easy to learn, and supported by giant ecosystems. In that context, Haskell is often thought of as academic — elegant, expressive, and mind-expanding, but too obscure and frankly too hard to be worth the investment for developers who are happy to use less demanding tools as long as they work.

There’s more to the story. Haskell’s type system offers huge practical benefits, especially for developers who need to prototype fast and make deep changes quickly and often while keeping code quality high. Haskell apps run fast and are a cinch to deploy, and the ecosystem is growing by huge leaps. And writing in it is just fun.

We’ll talk about how hard Haskell really is to learn, what makes it worthwhile to learn a language, whether it’s worth it to learn and use Haskell, and where you would start.

About Christian Brink

I was a business guy before my first startup went sideways and I decided to do my second one as a developer. Since November 2010 I’ve been teaching myself, freelancing, doing some really fun master’s coursework at Tufts, and most recently getting started on that second startup, which is what I’m working on over here at the west end of the Pivotal office.

I’ve used 7 or 8 languages in anger, and nothing turns me on like algebraic datatypes.