Sorry for the rant. I am preaching to the choir here. I recently saw a post in which someone regurgitated the often-commented Philip Wadler quote, “Agda is what Haskell wants to be when it grows up.” I love Agda, and one of my favorite papers of all time is a proof of computational complexity using Agda (https://projekter.aau.dk/projekter/files/335444832/pt101f20thesis.pdf). But I’m sorry, Haskell is the grown-up version of Agda, and it is the rational adult in a room full of children when compared to every other programming language. Agda, Idris, etc. are programming ideals, and I would love to see them reach the level of maturity of Haskell. But, guess what? You can do literally everything in Haskell, right now, at an astronomical level compared to any other programming language. Seriously.

In my job, I have the privilege of using Haskell for everything. Business logic? Pure Haskell. Databases? Haskell libraries, such as beam, persistent, hedis, and haskell-leveldb. Frontend? Reflex/Obelisk (hope Ryan and Ali keep posting updates 😘). APIs? Servant. Cryptography? I haven’t found a (commonly used) cryptography standard that doesn’t have a corresponding Haskell library. AWS? God damn, some dude maintains support for their entire service for free. Data science and ML? Ok, Python wins here. However, to borrow a technique from Python, anyone can use Haskell’s world-class FFI to call a C library for those things. It is actually that easy, and I have written several libraries for doing just that. By the way, doing everything in Haskell means you can actually refactor your fucking code. Swapping out databases becomes pedestrian and outright trivial.

When I program in Haskell, I am in utopia. I am in a different world than 99.9% of what I see posted on Reddit. Omg you hate null pointer exceptions? Use a language that literally prevents you from creating them. Omg, you have an entire CI pipeline to check for type errors between the frontend and backend? Use a language that allows your entire stack to be typechecked together, and a platform that allows you to write enjoyable frontend code (again, Ryan and Ali, keep up the good work 😉).

Haskell is the greatest language of all time, and I will die on this hill. Goodnight Brooklyn.