The realization of every successful digital project starts from searching for a reliable and convenient tech stack. It is especially important for large-scale projects and integrated systems where it is hard to find and eliminate bugs. Correctly chosen tools speed up the development and guarantee high-quality of your software, while a poor choice can result in a waste of time and money. 

Haskell is a functional programming language that helps many large companies to have a stable and high-functional backend. For example, Haskell, along with Scala, C++, and Clojure is widely used for building a range of applications at companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp. 

From this post, you will learn about Haskell and the benefits that it can bring to your project.

Top functional programming language

Functional programming first appeared more than 70 years ago. Of course, during this time many languages were created, each introducing new features and advanced functionality. Haskell is believed by many to be the most universal, and therefore, the most promising language in FP.

Haskell

Haskell is a general-purpose language that got its name after the mathematician Haskell Curry.

The most important features of Haskell are:

  • Haskell is purely functional. That means that for the same input values the functions always return ​the same result. Pure functions don’t interact with external mutable states. This makes the programming safe and convenient. It also provides great possibilities for parallel computing.
  • Haskell uses lazy evaluation. Lazy computing is a calculation strategy used in some programming languages, according to which calculations should be postponed until their result is needed. It allows us to speed up calculations in large projects.
  • Haskell is strongly typed. Implicit type conversions cannot happen in Haskell, so it’s impossible to mix the types during compilation. This, of course, leads to fewer bugs. Also, Haskell automatically infers types, which is very convenient.

Haskell is an excellent language for industrial use due to its highly expressive and concise syntax. It offers advanced type safety compared to most mainstream languages. Also, Haskell works great for quick prototyping.

Benefits of Haskell in industry

As with any programming language, Haskell’s benefits should, above all, aid a programmer in delivering business value. If it takes a long time to create or change a software product in a language, then it’s a bad language. Is Haskell good to use in industry? 

  • The purely functional nature of Haskell makes it a perfect tool for parallel computing in data mining, science and engineering, and advanced graphics. For smaller and more simple tasks like mobile application development, the benefits are almost unnoticeable. However, for more complex data structures, it allows the processing of large computations simultaneously, which is much faster. 
  • Haskell comes in handy in data-intensive industries such as finance,  medicine, and biotech. The expressive type system and abstractions simplify your big data infrastructure and make your code reusable. 
  • The strong type system provides opportunities for easy refactoring. It’s simpler to maintain the codebase or introduce global changes. Also, your solution will be scalable.
  • Banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions widely use Haskell for their backend projects. This language provides better protection against information security vulnerabilities and supports business functions even at high peak load. 
  • Google, Microsoft, and Twitter use Haskell for internal R&D projects. Facebook applies it to fight spam. Haskell lets these corporations provide uninterrupted service to millions of users. 

Summing up

Being a functional language, Haskell provides some undeniable benefits that are already actively used in the industry. This language guarantees security and stability to large-scale projects and allows to build fault-tolerant systems. So if your digital project belongs to the fields of blockchain, healthcare, or finance where increased security is especially important, you will not regret choosing this language for your tech stack.

Author bio (350): Arseniy Seroka is CEO, co-founder, and co-owner of a software engineering company Serokell. His team consists of passionate advocates of functional programming languages. Serokell promotes FP usage in industrial projects and delivers functional high-load systems in Haskell, Nix, and Elixir.