What Is Haskell, Who Uses It, And Where Can You Learn To Code It

Haskell language (and functional programming approach) has become more and more popular in the industry – businesses need robust and safe software solutions, and some of the problems can’t be solved without an advanced technological stack.  

Big companies use Haskell to execute complex and atypical tasks in different spheres like security, fintech, hardware backend, blockchain, big data, etc. While a larger list is available here, below are some of the more important ones: 

Facebook

Facebook uses Haskell to fight spam. Facebook engineers have chosen Haskell for its performance, interactive development support and other features that make Haskell the best choice for their Sigma project.

NVIDIA

NVIDIA uses Haskell for the backend development of its GPUs.

Microsoft

Microsoft uses Haskell in its Bond project. Bond is a cross-platform framework for working with schematized data. This framework is broadly used in high scale services.

J.P. Morgan

The largest bank in the United States has a Haskell group in its New Product Development team.

Barclays Capital

Barclays uses Haskell for its exotic trade tools. Here’s an interesting presentation prepared by Tim Williams. 

IBM, AT&T, and Bank of America also use Haskell and functional programming solutions for their projects.

Learn more about Haskell 

Some companies provide their functional programming expertise and promote Haskell through their own blog posts, courses, and other materials. I have collected some resources to learn from. 

If you want to change your mindset and programming approach by adding some abstractions, view your work from a different angle, or just add some expertise points to your CV, you should start learning functional programming languages right now.

Haskell Wiki

Everything starts with the Haskell wiki page. Here you can find books, tutorials, and other learning resources as well as different events, meetups, mailing lists and links to local user groups.

Haskell.org

Haskell org is the Haskell home page, where you will find any basic useful information about Haskell – documentation, downloads and resources. It is quite similar to Haskell Wiki, but here you can try Haskell coding and read about all main features of this functional programming language with code examples.

GitHub Haskell

Automatically updating list of the trending Haskell repositories.

If you want to refresh your e-library or like the smell of paper prints, check out these books:

Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

A well-illustrated book for Haskell beginners. From basic syntax, recursion, types and type classes to applicative functors, monads, and zippers.

Thinking Functionally with Haskell

It is a student book for a  first- or second-year undergraduate course written by Richard Bird. Contains 100+ exercises with solutions.

Learn Haskell Fast and Hard

Learn Haskell Fast and Hard is a great tutorial on how to learn Haskell properly. It is divided into 3 main parts – Essential Haskell, Hard Part and Hell Difficulty Part plus Introduction and Appendix which contains detailed explanations of infinite trees.

Other resources

The 'What' and 'Why' of Functional Programming Languages

This video is not only about Haskell, but it is a good lecture for newcomers.

C9 Lectures: Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals

13 lectures on functional programming basics. Dr. Erik Meijer explains fundamentals using Haskell as the language for understanding the functional principles.

Also, here’s my collection of Haskell-related Twitter accounts, check them out:

Haskell Weekly

Haskell News Digest

Evil Haskell Tips

Useful Haskell tips and tricks

HaskellLibHunt

Haskell libraries and the newsletter

That’s all for now. If you have some resources to add – feel free to share them in the comments!