Haskell success stories

posts.yaml

@@ -1,3 +1,6 @@
+- file: posts/haskell-success-stories.md
+  title: Haskell Success Stories
+  time: 2017-04-24T06:00:00Z
 - file: posts/generalizing-type-signatures.md
   title: Generalizing Type Signatures
   time: 2017-04-20T06:00:00Z

posts/haskell-success-stories.md

@@ -0,0 +1,58 @@
+I've probably blogged, spoken, Tweeted, and commented on a variation
+on this theme many times in the past, so please excuse me for being a
+broken record. This is important.
+
+I think we have a problem in the Haskell community. We all know that
+using Haskell to create a simple web service, a CRUD app, a
+[statically linked command line tool](https://twitter.com/pdxleif/status/855302710928613376),
+or a dozen other things is not only possible, but commonplace,
+trivial, and not even noteworthy. So we don't bother commenting when
+we create
+[general purpose reverse proxy tools](https://github.com/fpco/wai-middleware-crowd)
+with
+[prebuilt Docker images](https://hub.docker.com/r/fpco/wai-crowd/) for
+auth-enabling arbitrary webapps. It's boring. Unfortunately, __people
+outside our community don't know this__. By not bothering to talk
+about this (for us) boring topic, we're hiding away the fact that
+Haskell is a practical language for creating real things.
+
+Instead, we like to talk about
+[better preludes](http://www.snoyman.com/blog/2017/01/safe-prelude-a-thought-experiment),
+[optimizing common functions](http://www.snoyman.com/blog/2017/01/foldable-mapm-maybe-and-recursive-functions),
+or
+[dangers in our standard libraries](http://www.snoyman.com/blog/2016/12/beware-of-readfile). I'm
+picking on myself here with these examples, but my comments apply far
+more generally.
+
+I know personally at least 10-15 Haskell success stories that have
+never been talked about publicly. And I have to apologize for not
+leading by example here; unfortunately most of my work in the past few
+years has either been under NDA, or been of absolutely no interest to
+people outside the Haskell community (usually open source
+infrastructure and libraries). So I'm hoping to inspire others to step
+up to the plate.
+
+I'm not trying to tell anyone to stop talking about the things we find
+interesting. I just want to point out that just because we, within the
+Haskell community, may not find a "I launched a web service, and it's
+running, and it's not as buggy as we would have expected v1 to be"
+kind of blog post noteworthy, I think others _will_. These kinds of
+blog posts are also a much easier way to get started talking publicly
+about Haskell, since not all of us can explain zygohistomorphic
+prepomorphisms (I know I certainly can't).
+
+As I was batting the idea for this post around with
+[my wife](https://twitter.com/LambdaMom) last night, she pointed out
+that, most likely, the people best suited to write these kinds of
+posts may not have dedicated blogs at all right now. If you fall into
+that category, but would still be interested in writing up a post
+about your Haskell success story, I'd like to offer assistance. I'm
+happy to let guests write posts on the
+[Yesod blog](http://www.yesodweb.com/blog). Articles may also be
+relevant to [haskell-lang.org](https://haskell-lang.org). And we've
+run Haskell experience reports on
+[FP Complete's website](https://www.fpcomplete.com) many times in the
+past.
+
+I hope this time around this message had a bit of a different twist,
+and maybe can hit a different group of readers.