107 engineers on Hacker News describe using Haskell first-hand: 43 endorse it, 10 regret it, 17 are mixed.
“I don't use Haskell, but I never regret time I spent trying to conquer it.”
endorse · personal · iLemming · 2025-11-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've written Haskell code in production and I still find the syntax the most eloquent.”
endorse · production · elbear · 2024-12-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it took me around 5 years of attempts to finally get the tooling to work... Haskell is more fun”
mixed · personal · 5 yr · frankie_t · 2024-12-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We like our stuff in Haskell. Watching the rest of the industry move forward is like a reverse trip around the Monopoly board”
endorse · production · mrkeen · 2024-08-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Anyone in the org hearing the word "Haskell" would invariably just think about it lol”
regret · personal · pram · 2024-06-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Love Haskell as a language, but it's just not a popular target, and I wasn't brave enough to go for C interop.”
mixed · personal · aphyr · 2023-12-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“ugh first time I touched a haskell codebase it was crashing in prod and nobody knew why”
regret · production · awinter-py · 2023-06-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“But if you've never experienced the maintenance and upgrade of a very large Haskell codebase over a period of years, especially if you have a big dependency-tree”
mixed · production · gavinray · 2022-12-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“which was a pain to setup on my local machine but now that GHCi and Stack finally support it, I think it's getting stable.”
mixed · personal · bmc7505 · 2021-12-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I feel like I'm kinda glad it's not mainstream due to the shenanigans that I might have to deal with in production code.”
mixed · personal · saghm · 2021-12-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I would always eventually run into a wall of abstraction as soon as things got more than a little bit complicated.”
mixed · personal · davesque · 2021-11-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Haskell is by far the most worth-it skill I've cultivated. ... I sneak Haskell in all my jobs anyways - scripting”
endorse · production · whateveracct · 2021-08-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've used all of these languages, and IMO Haskell is definitely more fun, but I actually felt a lot less efficient and encountered harder-to-find bugs.”
regret · personal · armchairhacker · 2021-07-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I felt really confident relying on it to catch issues due to the strong type guarantees.”
endorse · production · bweitzman · 2021-02-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I learned a ton from Haskell, and am so glad I used it in depth for awhile (ditto ML).”
mixed · production · jamwt · 2021-02-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“In my experience Haskell significantly outperforms C++ on real-world business problems with realistic development effort”
mixed · production · lmm · 2020-12-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We @ juspay.in use it to power a bulk of UPI payment transactions. API (CRUD/Auth) code written in HS becomes a beauty”
mixed · production · zenknight · 2020-12-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“At Riskbook we have about 50,000 lines of Haskell and about 20,000 lines of Elm running in production. It's working great for us.”
endorse · production · yakshaving_jgt · 2020-11-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have written it for money and had the code run on big fleets. Haskell is really cool, but IMHO is held back from practical adoption”
mixed · production · benreesman · 2020-09-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I enjoy Haskell and I use it for some of my own projects, but I rarely use it professionally.”
endorse · personal · 7 yr · mark_l_watson · 2019-12-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Never experienced a bug, and never had to restart the server (thanks Haskell!).”
endorse · production · 2 yr · alexmingoia · 2019-12-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I love building web apps with Haskell. Experiencing zero bugs and crashes after pushing to production... Haskell isn't perfect, the tooling and ecosystem leaves much to be desired”
mixed · production · alexmingoia · 2019-12-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we migrated from NodeJS / Angular to Haskell / Elm and couldn't be happier.”
endorse · production · seddona · 2019-10-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I learned Haskell and it's a giant waste of time.”
regret · personal · zelly · 2019-10-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“learning Haskell had a huge benefit to my day job, probably much more than I imagine learning x86 assembly would.”
endorse · personal · rifung · 2019-10-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“My Haskell background comes from building upon academic proofs of concept during a stint at CSAIL. Never again.”
regret · production · jakear · 2019-08-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“once your code builds and you ship -- man, there is nothing remotely like it. v1.0 software running for weeks in prod without a bug.”
endorse · production · spopejoy · 2019-06-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We tried to use it in production for 1-2 projects... It didn't work out, we found it's not a good fit for changing requirements.”
regret · production · Maro · 2018-12-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I was more unproductive with Haskell than I've ever been with C... I just don't see me ever using it in production”
regret · personal · atilaneves · 2018-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I don't regret the time I invested in Haskell but the payoff isn't obvious.”
mixed · personal · jeremyjh · 2017-11-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I spent whole days messing with package management issues that would render my projects unrunnable after new installs.”
regret · personal · 3131s · 2017-11-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“But we don't run into trouble! Mutable arrays are provided in Haskell! Haskell has mutation! Here's the code”
endorse · personal · tome · 2017-08-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The person responsible for our industry leading portfolio compression joined us because we use Haskell.”
endorse · production · willtim · 2016-11-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Having gone down the Haskell rathole, it's clear to me that the advertising is better than the product.”
regret · personal · Steeeve · 2016-11-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I wrote plenty of Haskell commercially (and for fun). Not once did we run into that problem.”
endorse · production · eru · 2016-07-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“since the other contributor familiar with Java/C/C++ was not able to pick at it effectively, we switched to Rust”
regret · personal · zZorgz · 2016-06-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“IMVU has used Haskell in production for years and it's been great.”
endorse · production · chadaustin · 2015-06-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Haskell is unique among any languages I've ever used in production that allows deterministic testability”
endorse · production · chadaustin · 2015-06-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I do not regret learning Haskell and believe doing so was a worthwhile exercise.”
endorse · personal · jcadam · 2015-05-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I loved Haskell, seriously! The year was 1997 and my uni professor was contributing to Hugs”
mixed · personal · amazing_jose · 2015-04-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use Haskell heavily at my startup and it's definitely a competitive edge”
endorse · production · Ixiaus · 2014-12-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've rebuilt two startups from Scala / Python messes with Haskell.”
endorse · production · Ixiaus · 2014-12-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We taught our PHP team haskell. They had their first project in production in three months. There's nothing special about math and haskell.”
endorse · production · imanaccount247 · 2014-12-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“learning Haskell was a supremely educational experience. There is no better way to learn functional programming techniques and you will not regret learning it.”
endorse · personal · christensen_emc · 2014-12-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I'm learning Haskell right now and it's great.”
endorse · personal · sfrank2147 · 2014-12-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using Haskell for a few months now, and quicksort has become trivial to read.”
endorse · personal · Yxven · 2014-11-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Haskell is different, the concepts of monad, category and so on allow you to obtain a higher order view of your ideas”
endorse · personal · barbudorojo · 2014-11-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Haskell won, even beating the reference 'C' implementation that we thought would have been the benchmark”
endorse · personal · zoomerang · 2014-10-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I forced myself to use Haskell for everything: build scripts, RabbitMQ consumer, web app. Once I got over the pain of learning new APIs, I didn't regret the decision once.”
endorse · personal · shadytrees · 2014-06-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I personally have never felt constrained by Haskell's purity.”
endorse · production · christianpbrink · 2013-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Coming to Scala from experience including C, Java and Haskell”
endorse · personal · NickPollard · 2013-12-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have ~100k lines of haskell code in production. I have never even thought about having to "accommodate" laziness in any of that code.”
endorse · production · asdasf · 2013-10-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I decided to learn Haskell and I don't regret it. But I often feel it's more like trying to cut vegetables with a katana”
mixed · personal · bonobo · 2013-07-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Haskell makes it hard to do things like that.”
mixed · production · sseveran · 2013-04-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I spend no more time dealing with dependencies in haskell than I did in scala”
endorse · production · papsosouid · 2013-01-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“In production Haskell code, I will usually wrap Double values with newtypes, to e.g distinguish currency amounts”
endorse · production · dons · 2012-12-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“while I prefer Haskell, I would be perfectly happy with OCaml”
endorse · personal · tikhonj · 2012-12-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“In my own Haskell experience, ... I've never really felt like Haskell's type checking has been a hindrance.”
endorse · personal · tmhedberg · 2012-08-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We are doing traditional IO-heavy database oriented web development, but leveraging Haskell to make things better in ways not possible in other langauges.”
endorse · production · gregwebs · 2011-12-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I love(d) Haskell because it pretty much worked if it compiled (but monads are too restrictive)”
mixed · personal · CoffeeDregs · 2011-12-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've just been using Haskell as more of a hacker language than a "bondage and discipline" language”
endorse · personal · tikhonj · 2011-12-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Haskell, mostly thanks to pattern matching, helped me internalize recursion much more than Scheme when I was learning the two concurrently.”
endorse · personal · tikhonj · 2011-12-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Overall, I've found Haskell's type system to be much more useful, and much less of a burden, than Java's.”
endorse · personal · tikhonj · 2011-10-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“My experience with everything from simple checksum functions to parameter estimators (ML) is that Haskell is generally at least 2-10x slower than C”
mixed · personal · microtonal · 2011-10-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It's deployed in production (as a part of http://www.webpop.com) and has been extremely stable.”
endorse · production · 5 yr · bobfunk · 2011-10-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I'm currently learning a couple of functional languages (including Haskell) and using it in production environments”
endorse · production · MatthewPhillips · 2011-10-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I really love Haskell and even if I don't use it on my day-to-day, it is great to hack out a Haskell program every once in awhile.”
endorse · personal · mitchellh · 2011-07-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I am using Haskell in production. ... My clients (the users of the system) are delighted.”
endorse · production · plinkplonk · 2010-11-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I write my software in Haskell because it doesn't crash in production. But then again, before I deploy, I ensure that there are unit tests.”
endorse · production · jrockway · 2010-09-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using it to guide me through Haskell and I've learned so much more than I did in college”
neutral · personal · slaymaker1907 · 2026-11-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“And I say this as someone who has written Haskell code in production.”
neutral · production · Refefer · 2026-10-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using pattern matching since the late nineties when I first learnt ML and a bit of Haskell”
neutral · personal · pron · 2026-10-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We intermix html, regex, js, C, and even some Haskell to get stuff done.”
neutral · personal · smj-edison · 2025-12-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“as an organization we skew very heavily towards favoring simple Haskell”
neutral · production · iand675 · 2024-12-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I work on the assembler part of the toolchain, which is written in Haskell.”
neutral · production · tome · 2023-12-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've worked in prod with all the cool languages (Scala, Haskell, Rust, Go, etc...)”
neutral · production · eddsh1994 · 2023-03-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It was originally a nginx+lua service that we migrated to Haskell as the requirements became more complex.”
neutral · production · aviaviavi · 2023-03-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it probably doesn't help that I've used Scala, Haskell, Rust, etc”
neutral · personal · xwowsersx · 2022-12-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“After working with Haskell, Rust, JavaScript, and many other languages in production all I look for is simplicity.”
neutral · production · eddsh1994 · 2022-12-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using it for five years now and as my main professional language for three years.”
neutral · production · 3 yr · oxymoron · 2021-12-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I now use Emacs or VSCode about equal amounts for Common Lisp, Racket, and Haskell”
neutral · personal · mark_l_watson · 2019-12-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“then used Haskell for about a year, and some Scala.”
neutral · production · 1 yr · yogthos · 2018-12-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we run on elm and a mix of Haskell and go”
neutral · production · giulioungaretti · 2018-11-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've also used Haskell and Scala which have advanced type systems.”
neutral · personal · yogthos · 2018-10-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“However, I've also used Haskell and Scala which have advanced type systems.”
neutral · personal · yogthos · 2017-12-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“uses Haskell almost exclusively on the backend. We use it to write our API and internal tools”
neutral · production · kepano · 2017-12-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using Haskell for some years.”
neutral · personal · tome · 2017-12-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“For my personal website, I wrote a backend in Haskell”
neutral · personal · floatboth · 2016-12-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Perhaps I've been using Haskell too long but that code looks very clear to me.”
neutral · personal · codygman · 2016-12-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“now that I have a little functional programming experience with Haskell”
neutral · personal · emptyflask · 2015-07-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Seriously, how can I hack around and understand this?”
neutral · personal · commentzorro · 2015-06-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've looked into Haskell, and loved it. Even though I've never used it for any code that ran in production”
neutral · personal · graffitici · 2015-05-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using Haskell for about 7 years, 5 of which commerically”
neutral · production · 7 yr · hesselink · 2014-11-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“learnt some Haskell in 2001 in college (just the basics, equivalent of first 6 chapters of LYAH, no monads).”
neutral · personal · radmuzom · 2014-11-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The only other language I've used that I've had that experience with was Haskell”
neutral · personal · eridius · 2014-11-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I can write Haskell code well enough, I've even had some in production”
neutral · production · freshhawk · 2014-09-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Haxl is the only team using Haskell in prod, so the team itself isn't all that large.”
neutral · production · JonCoens · 2014-06-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Having learned perl, ruby and python (these are all incredibly similar), and then Clojure, I've found that I really like the functional paradigm.”
neutral · personal · Myk267 · 2013-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I had a decently working URL-shortener up and running in an hour of composing haskell modules”
neutral · personal · arianvanp · 2013-12-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I worked through a lot of SICP in highschool and was teaching myself Haskell after learning a lot of web development stuff.”
neutral · personal · jgg · 2013-08-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've dabbled in Fortran/PHP/Ruby/Haskell/Scala/Clojure but they become hazy after a while.”
neutral · personal · ww520 · 2012-12-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“this has led me to Clojure, CL, Haskell and Erlang.”
neutral · personal · biscarch · 2012-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“There are other projects written in Haskell that, alas, we're not ready to talk intelligently about publicly.”
neutral · production · kmavm · 2012-11-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have been using haskell and clojure in vim for a few months now”
neutral · personal · adrusi · 2011-12-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the server side is pure Haskell. We're using the Snap web framework, Heist templating and a couple of open source libraries”
neutral · production · ivanstojic · 2011-07-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I didn't have (almost) any experience with Haskell before, indeed.”
neutral · personal · iustin · 2010-09-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?