Haskell in industry: a surprising encounter!
Earlier this week I had a very surprising and unexpected Haskell encounter! It started when a fairly large furniture shop in the area called me in to do some work on some of their intranet software.
They wanted some functionality added to their existing Web-based purchasing system. They’d mentioned that it was CGI-based, so I was thinking it was comprised of Perl or Python scripts. However, I was quite wrong! After getting access to the source code of their CGI scripts, I noticed immediately that they were all written in Haskell.
I inquired about this, and apparently it was initially written by a local university student that had interned there for some time. I suppose he or she had taken a course in Haskell, or had used it on his or her own time.
Regardless, the code was quite well written for a CGI script. I’ve dealt with some very messy Perl scripts in the past, and these Haskell-based CGI scripts were far better. They were clear and concise, as Haskell programs usually tend to be. Furthermore, they were quite easy to comprehend, and adding the functionality they required was not at all difficult. But most importantly, it shows that Haskell is very well suited to “real world” applications.