There is this memo video of S. P. Jones that famously says "Haskell is Useless". I love Haskell, but I wished it was universal like C, C++, JavaScript, Rust, and C#. By that I mean: It could be used to create apps for desktop, mobile, and web. JavaScript can be used to do so many things like power the entire web, be on node and let anyone create cli and share the code with web, and mobile through React Native, on desktop with Electron and its alike things, it lets you do plugins for god knows how many things, it lets you write things for the GNOME Shell... C and C++ are perhaps behind everything in the world and string theory finally gets seen will see they are written in C. And they can be compiled to Web and almost everything in the world. Rust is a placeholder for the two, and C# reinvented itself when it saw Mono and now works even in the browser. Each time I see Haskell I wonder what else can I do rather than creating CLI apps, and it makes me choose something else that grants me more code reuse and interesting applications.

If I could have a vision for Haskell, it was for it to be useful. Academic research and making compilers is cool, a few cli things here and there are cool too, but why can't we build music players and game engines and flutters and web pages with it? The language is way more elegant and beautiful than all the JS/C like languages out there and I really wished I could use it for the things I did. I'm aware of Servant/Yesod/IHP/Miso/Reflex for web, GTK/Monomer for desktop, TidalCycles for music, SDL/gloss for games, and various FFI/plugin, but none of them feel as coherent and worked on as the others, none of them are polished. Haskell surely needs good DX, but it also needs really better reasons for existing.

> There is this memo video of S. P. Jones that famously says "Haskell is Useless".

I think that is an unfair characterization of the video and the intent of Haskell's co-creator, based on the rest of your comment. Simon Peyton Jones makes a graph with two dimensions, useful/useless and safe/unsafe. The question he gets at is: how can one distinguish between effectful and effect-free computations in a programming language? He proceeds to characterize most useful languages as unsafe, and Haskell as useless but safe. He then spends the majority of the video talking about how useful languages are becoming safer, and at the same time how Haskell must become useful.

https://youtu.be/iSmkqocn0oQ

It's really hard to be the best at every platform, and at every problem area. Especially at the start. But once you have dominance in some niche, that may give you the power/possibility to dominate other niches.

I think this article tries to figure out where can Haskell be the best.

As for a platform? If Haskell can offer the most secure, correct, and trusted web apps(the biggest platform), created with the help of LLM's, and they can use LLM's to make reading Haskell intuitive, that's a good place.

> It could be used to create apps for desktop, mobile, and web

Haskell can 100% be used to create all of these kinds of apps.

It sounds like it needs foundational libraries? Or is it something else. For example, almost everything I write requires one or more of:

  - Embedded toolchain and/or HAL/register map for my MCU family or CPU arhitecture
  - A GUI library and/or basic I/O interaction library (keyboard/mouse to start)
  - A GPU interaction library
  - A web framework (Not going to roll my own DB interface, auth, user system, router, template system etc)

whats holding you back? buy claude pro and make it reality, hell im gonna give it try because your comment offends me

> Functional programming should not be viewed as a tuxedo that we dust off and use when we want to be "fancy programmers." It's simply a tool in the toolbox.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15486063

So what's missing? GUI libraries?