Why Haskell?

In this article, we will distill how functional programming is intellectually stimulating and practically useful.

Let’s start with an example. Here’s an implementation of quicksort. It’s a striking example of Haskell’s expressivity and concision.

In what follows, we’ll talk more about the implementation details of Haskell that enables this.

Feel free to play around with it in the embedded interpreter:

quicksort [] = []
quicksort (p:xs) = (quicksort lesser) ++ [p] ++ (quicksort greater)
  where
    lesser = filter (< p) xs
    greater = filter (>= p) xs

Functionality

Noun, “The quality of being suited to serve a purpose well; practicality” (source: OED)
Noun, “Of or relating to functions in computer science or mathematics.” (source: us)

Functional programming, pertains to both definitions. By programming at a higher level of abstraction, it is often easier to get things done with less code.

On the other hand, functional programming is fundamentally about programming with functions.

Expressivity

Haskell enables concise but powerful programs. Nearly all types can be inferred by the compiler. Functional programming emphasizes higher order functions and writing software at a higher level of abstraction.

Collectively, this makes it possible to express ideas in fewer lines of code.

Immutability

In Haskell, data is immutable by default. Pure, functional code is easier to reason about than stateful code. Immutability prevents an entire class of bugs from the get go.

Immutable, functionally pure languages are often well suited to applications of concurrency.

Safety

A strong, static type system makes it possible to write safe code for systems that matter. In Haskell, GHC compiler identifies bugs before code is even run. Libraries like quickcheck can even automatically generate tests to accelerate development time.

Orthogonality

Haskell, and functional programming more broadly, is uncommon and orthogonal to the typical norm in software engineering.

We argue that this orthogonality is a feature, not a bug. For startups, it is often essential to move faster than industry competitors, and Haskell’s unique tooling allows one to do so.