Haskell's virginity

The most popular open source project ever written in Haskell, the Darcs code management system, is being dropped by Darcs' only significant user base, the developers of the defacto-standard Haskell Compiler GHC.

The developers of GHC cited poor stability and poor performance (their benchmark results found Darcs to be up to 50× slower than its competitors at core operations). They currently intend to migrate GHC to the Git version control software, which is written in C. Even software written in Python (Mercurial) was also considered because it is so much faster than Darcs.

This led us to revisit the subject of Haskell's popularity and track record. We had reviewed Haskell last year in order to ascertain its commercial viability when we were looking to diversify into other functional languages. Our preliminary results suggested that Haskell was one of the most suitable functional languages but this recent news has brought that into question.

Our latest research produced the following statistics regarding the number of installs on Ubuntu and Debian of the most popular programs written in OCaml and Haskell along with their source code size:

Name    Installs    Lines of code    Language
FFTW    184,574    14,298    OCaml
Unison    12,866    23,993    OCaml
MLDonkey    7,286    171,332    OCaml
Darcs    4,365    24,937    Haskell
Free Tennis    4,066    7,419    OCaml
Planets    4,057    3,296    OCaml
HPodder    3,465    2,225    Haskell
LEdit    2,965    2,048    OCaml
Hevea    2,822    11,596    OCaml
Polygen    2,657    1,331    OCaml
This equates to:
* 221,293 installs of popular OCaml software compared to only 7,830 of Haskell.
* 235,312 lines of well-tested OCaml code compared to only 27,162 lines of well-tested Haskell code.
Our OCaml products, particularly OCaml for Scientists and The OCaml Journal, have proven that OCaml is one of the few commercially-viable functional programming languages. These remarkable new figures show that Haskell is still a virgin language: despite a huge number of open source projects being started in Haskell, virtually none reach maturity and the vast majority of those never garner a significant user base (i.e. they remain untested). Only Darcs and HPodder ever became popular but the most popular, Darcs, has turned out to be too difficult to fix and optimize even by expert Haskell programmers.

Our conclusion is, of course, that we are not going to consider diversifying into the Haskell market, at least not until it matures. Right now, Scala is looking much more viable.

lol rubyfags

I recall reading something about Darcs being more sophisticated than other version controll systems in such a way that called for an implementation that was inherently slow as fuck, regardless of being written in Haskell.

Is that some Jon Harrop post from reddit? He sure posts everywhere.

THIS IS THE END HASKELL HAS BEEN PROVEN NOT TO BE A SERIOUS LANGUAGE OH NO I CAN'T HAVE FUN WRITING HASKELL CODE ANY MORE

>>3
yhe, darcs be ful of abstrakt bulschite that ye shulen not vndurstonde.

>>1
whi use thei git that is slowe as darcs, if slowenessis be the cause?

The Xen hypervisor is an OCaml project.  Does Haskell have anything similar to its name?

FACT: HASKELL IS DYING

>>8
Not again! ;_;

It is official; Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd now confirms: Haskell is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Haskell community when Debian confirmed that Haskell market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all projects. Coming close on the heels of a recent Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd survey which plainly states that Haskell has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Haskell is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Lambda the Ultimate comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Haskell's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Haskell faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Haskell because Haskell is dying. Things are looking very bad for Haskell. As many of us are already aware, Haskell continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

GHC is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departure of long time GHC developer SPJ Peyton Jones only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: GHC is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

HUGS leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of HUGS. How many users of Darcs are there? Let's see. The number of Darcs versus HUGS posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Darcs users. XMonad posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Darcs posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of XMonad. A recent article put GHC at about 80 percent of the Haskell market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 GHC users. This is consistent with the number of GHC Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, GHC went out of business and was taken over by GHCi who sell another troubled interpreter. Now GHCi is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that Haskell has steadily declined in market share. Haskell is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Haskell is to survive at all it will be among FP dilettante dabblers. Haskell continues to decay. Nothing short of a cockeyed miracle could save Haskell from its fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Haskell is dead.

Fact: Haskell is dying

>>10
You forgot to change Theo(from the FreeBSD copy pasta)

Now you too can enjoy the experience of taking Haskell's virginity:
http://i43.tinypic.com/2ypbux1.jpg

haskell sucks

>>12
Let me guess, it's from Japan.

>>14
it's pretty obvious when they use an ugly font like that.

>>14
The font is OK, it's the white artifact-ridden outline that hurts eyes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_%28Gnosticism%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomad_%28disambiguation%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonad