Haskell is Not For Production and Other Tales

Katie Miller debunks common myths about Haskell by sharing her experiences using the language and Haxl at Facebook.

Katie Miller linux.conf.au/schedule/30363/view_talk Some say it was written exclusively for Unix-bearded wizards with PhDs. Some say only 10x programmers and unicorns can decipher its many operators. Some say any coding problem it touches will be saved from callback hell and find everlasting peace. The Haskell programming language has long been the subject of myths and misconceptions. Nonetheless it has been adopted by a slew of companies big and small, including Facebook, which has a large Haskell deployment and dozens of engineers using the language. In this keynote, Katie will explore some of the pervasive stereotypes about the poster child of statically typed functional programming and compare and contrast them with her experiences working as a Haskell developer on the open-source Haxl project, which is used to fight spam at Facebook. As the former journalist investigates which stories stack up, she’ll share insights on what functional programming and Haskell have to offer, the challenges that come with their use, and where the ecosystem could be improved.