A couple million lines of Haskell: Production engineering at Mercury (blog.haskell.org)

Article summary

The article discusses the use of Haskell in production at Mercury, a fintech company, and how it has helped the company achieve reliability and scalability. The author, an engineer at Mercury, shares their experience with Haskell and how it has been used to build a large codebase with a team of generalists who learned the language on the job. The article highlights the benefits of using Haskell, including its ability to encode operational knowledge into APIs and make the safe path the easy one. The author also discusses the importance of thinking about reliability in terms of adaptive capacity, rather than just preventing failures.

Main themes

• Haskell in production
• Reliability and scalability
• Type systems and operational knowledge
• Codebase maintenance
• Team dynamics and knowledge sharing

What commenters say

• The choice of Haskell as a programming language may have contributed to Mercury's success, but it's difficult to determine the exact impact.
• Haskell's type system and functional programming paradigm can help prevent certain types of bugs and make code more maintainable, but may not be the only factor in a company's success.
• The use of Haskell requires a certain level of discipline and expertise, and may not be suitable for all teams or projects.
• Other programming languages, such as Rust and TypeScript, can also provide similar benefits to Haskell in terms of type safety and code maintainability.
• The benefits of Haskell, such as its expressiveness and conciseness, may be offset by the difficulty of finding experienced developers and the potential for over-engineering.
• The importance of metrics and data in evaluating the effectiveness of a programming language or technology choice is debated, with some arguing that it's difficult to measure and others believing it's essential for informed decision-making.
• The trade-offs between different programming languages and paradigms, such as performance, productivity, and maintainability, are complex and depend on the specific needs and goals of a project.