Haskell Foundation 2026 Update(discourse.haskell.org)
87 pointsby azhenley5 hours ago8 comments
  • pianopatrickan hour ago
    The thought crosses my mind that Haskell may be uniquely suited for AI coding using a very small context window (cheap). Haskell encourages small functions and no global state. So you may be able to capture all the relevant context for editing a Haskell function within a few hundred or few thousand tokens. That would be better than some other languages. Plus the strong typing could help AI agents catch errors.

    I have not played around with it to see how that plays out with agentic coding. But it does seem like an interesting idea.

    • the-grump23 minutes ago
      As someone who loves Haskell more than any other language, some challenges are

      - the tooling is decades behind, say, Rust or Go

      - finding the right library in looks very different in Haskell--you frequently start with the signature on Hoogle. Agents can learn this but it's not the same as "web search"

      - creating the right solution also looks different. It's usually borne out of thinking about the types and coming up with the correct algebra. Again models can probably learn to create the right types and orient the solution around that, but it's not automatic

      - same today as yesterday, laziness is a blessing and a curse. The runtime can do unpredictable things when you suddenly evaluate a deep thunk

      - GHC directives effectively mean there are multiple "Haskells"

      Some of those are a result of the "avoid success at all costs" mantra. You can't shake that off in a day. It will take a concerted effort to make it more amenable for seamless adoption.

      Haskell continues to be my favorite language to write and read, but Rust is the more practical language with a rich type system. If you're looking for something approaching Haskell's expressiveness but with fewer of these issues, check out PureScript.

    • uHuge14 minutes ago
      Yup, it was mostly pleasure AI coding a company codebase in Scala. I'm considering it for next projects for this reason although my understanding and intuition for Scala code is much weaker than for Python.
    • idle_zealot26 minutes ago
      I suspect that the compact nature of the syntax would require more tokens spent "thinking" to get decent results. It might be more efficient for simple code though. Either way worth testing. Surely someone must've set up a "how well LLMs handle Xlang" benchmark suite.
  • NexraGear22 minutes ago
    Nice to see continued investment in the Haskell ecosystem. Long-term sustainability for niche but highly influential programming languages is incredibly important for the broader software community.
  • faangguyindiaan hour ago
    Developer exercise is still lacking in Haskell ecosystem.

    Slow build times, deployment to Linux when developing on macos still pain. Deployment is pain specially on commodity VPS.

    Go is very easy to cross compile and deploy.

    But Haskell is better for a few things, but I've hardtime deploying it

    • frogulis10 minutes ago
      > Deployment is pain specially on commodity VPS.

      Oh? Why is that?

  • chowells4 hours ago
    Glad to see Simon Marlow didn't just vanish into Facebook.
    • qrobit15 minutes ago
      He doesn't have a role at Facebook anymore AFAIK, although I can't find the source now. I remember hearing it was mostly due to filtering engine at Facebook being rewritten in Hack, so they don't have the need for Haskell people anymore.
  • thecloudlet2 hours ago
    Really like this language. I would love more if we can make developing production code easier.
  • satvikpendem2 hours ago
    I heard of HVM recently, is that still related to Haskell or has that become its own thing?
    • bjolian hour ago
      It is just a runtime, no? I have only ever heard about it as something to run their own bend programming language.

      Are people targeting it as a runtime for Haskell as well?

  • benleejamin4 hours ago
    How is the Haskell Foundation doing these days? Are we worried about its future?
  • carterschonwald4 hours ago
    this sounds like a nice non prescriptive direction. jose is a pretty cool dude. pre covid we theoretically were gonna poke a defining a memory model of ghc haskell c— / hs / core , but life intervened