Completely false. Many “real world” businesses are shipping web apps in Haskell. Anecdotally, they take less time to write than the equivalent Rails app.
I don't know. I've been slinging Haskell on the side for the better part of a decade and do most of my day to day in RoR (trying to start moving clients over to Elixir/Phoenix.)
Haskell is an amazing language. I would totally buy that Haskell teams probably win in the medium to long-term as the wins you get in terms of support/maintenance/extensibility are pretty obvious.
However, anecdotally, Haskell forces me (and I imagine other programmers) to invest a lot more time up-front into getting your design in order. Haskell punishes an "oh I'll just hack that out" attitude pretty badly. Which, as I said above I would completely believe leads to wins in the medium to long-term. If I need to bang out an MVP over the weekend, I'm probably not choosing Haskell unless it's well-trodden Haskell territory.
Additionally, while the language itself is amazing, the ecosystem has issues (enumerated in the article.) Tooling sucks, there aren't enough examples of people doing normal things, there are frequently not libraries for basic things, obviously integrations with popular services are lacking, and the list goes on.
When Haskell has a decently mature and actively developed web framework that has reasonable docs, examples, and a not pathetic ecosystem (by the standard of modern web frameworks) I'll happily jump into using Haskell in production. Unfortunately, these aren't things enough of the community seems interested in to have significant movement on.
Servant looks very interesting with regards to what I'm looking for, but I'd be lying if I said I understood the types.
I spent 7 months trying to build a json api using yesod with a friend. We had nothing but headaches. Its insanely hard to find example code or search issues when using yesod. Hardly anything exists about it on stack overflow already so any time I had an issue I had to post it on SO and wait a day for someone to answer it which meant I could only do about an hour of programming a day. I ended up giving up used RoR and replicated more than the 7 months worth of work in a few weeks.
There is a very good reason RoR is far more popular than haskell web apps. Its just so easy to get started with rails, there is a near infinite amount of information online.
Many web apps might be written in haskell but I assure you many many many more are written in ruby. I very much doubt you will find a haskell developer willing to build your web store in haskell for $15/hour. With rails you can just import Spree, make a few modifications and host it and you are done.
I write Haskell web apps, and I used to write Ruby web apps. You don't need to assure me; I'm well aware.
If you're in the realm of "import Spree, make a few modifications and you are done", then sure, use Ruby.
The products I work on just aren't that generic/trivial.
> I very much doubt you will find a haskell developer willing to build your web store in haskell for $15/hour.
The market is larger than you think. I have hired people before at $15 per hour. I have people working for me now at $23 per hour. Not everything needs to be stupid SV money.
