This is part 8 in a series of articles on obscure programming languages.
What is Haskell?
Haskell is an open source, standardized, purely functional programming language with non-strict semantics. With strong support for integration with other languages, built-in concurrency and parallelism, debuggers, profilers, rich libraries and an active community, Haskell enables developers to produce flexible, maintainable, high-quality software.
Haskell History
Following the release of the Miranda programming language in 1985, interest in lazy functional languages grew. Lazy (or delayed) evaluation is the technique of delaying computation until the result of the computation is known to be needed. By 1987, more than a dozen non-strict, purely functional programming languages existed. A committee was formed to define an open standard for such languages and consolidate existing functional languages into a common language that would serve as a basis for future research in functional-language design. The result was Haskell, and version 1.0 was released in 1990. Haskell 98 provided a stable, minimal, portable version of the language and an accompanying standard library for teaching. The language continues to evolve rapidly, with the GHC implementation representing the current de facto standard.
“Hello, World” in Haskell
main = putStrLn "Hello World"
References
Article published on March 18, 2009
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March 18th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
For a much better overview of the history of Haskell, check … “The History of Haskell” https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers/history-of-haskell/index.htm
Also, I’m not sure how obscure I’d rate it, considering how big the user community is. But oh well.
March 18th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
Haskell ranks #34 among programming languages with only 0.167% usage according to TIOBE. So maybe not obscure, but not a massive user community either.
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/company/Home.html
March 18th, 2009 at 7:53 pm
I think “obscure” is not the right adjective.
According to the TIOBE ranking Haskell is not as “obscure” as Transact-Sql or Bourne Shell.
🙂
March 19th, 2009 at 3:07 am
TIOBE is pretty dodgy at best. For a different angle, consider that,
e.g. the #haskell IRC channel community is larger than #perl or #ruby
http://searchirc.com/search.php?SCHANS=1&SSORT=SIZE&N=freenode
I think I’m just objecting to the term “obscure” to refer to one the
most prominent functional languages of the decade.
March 19th, 2009 at 8:50 am
I’m a huge Haskell fan! I used it during my senior project and fell in love with it. But I have to agree that it is a bit obscure. I don’t personally know anyone outside the university who uses Haskell for production development, and I work in a relatively large company and have many programmer friends. Everyone is doing java and c# these days. Thank goodness for the web where I can find my Haskell brothers. So I dont take offense to the term obscure, unfortunately, it’s more true than not. I’m just thankful that Haskell is getting some publicity on this site.
March 19th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
Haskell is no doubt the most popular language starting with H
March 20th, 2009 at 7:45 pm
[…] […]
March 24th, 2009 at 5:46 am
Nice try IO…hahahaha
May 5th, 2010 at 5:08 pm
Haskell is quite widely used in investment banking. Those guys are are at the cutting edge of research into mathematical models and artificial intelligence so I expect it’ll be more mainstream in a few years once it’s advantages become wider known.
I’ve never known a more ‘dense’ language i.e. how much you can do with so few lines of code but it’s not for the mentally underdeveloped which is why most of you are using Java and C#.