The realization of every successful digital project starts with a search for a reliable and convenient tech stack. In large-scale projects and integrated systems, it is hard to find and eliminate bugs. Correctly chosen tools speed up development and guarantee the 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 have a stable and highly functional backend. Along with Scala, C++, and Clojure, Haskell 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. During this time, many languages were developed, each introducing new features and advanced functionality. Haskell is believed by many to be the most universal, and therefore, the most promising language of FP.
Haskell
Haskell is a general-purpose language that was named after the mathematician Haskell Curry.
The most important features of Haskell are:
- Haskell is purely functional. This 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 change 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? Here are the benefits of Haskell, that will help you decide!
- Haskell’s purely functional nature makes it a perfect tool for parallel computing in data mining, science, engineering, and advanced graphics. For smaller and simpler 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 loads.
- Popular social networks use Haskell for internal R&D projects. Facebook applies it to fight spam. Haskell lets these corporations provide uninterrupted service to millions of users.
Haskell Case Studies
There is no better way to illustrate the potential of a programming language than to see how it is used in practice.
Riskbook
Riskbook marketplace improves the placement experience of reinsurance brokers and underwriters. They use Haskell for the backend of their platform, and it demonstrates great results.
Tech companies operating in the reinsurance industry like Riskbook create risk programs and then offer them to underwriters within their online platform. A risk program is a complex piece of software, which demands tools for easy modeling and prototyping. Writing robust and secure software was also one of the key goals for them.
Haskell gave them an enormous amount of leverage. For example, type-checking enabled the company to make massive changes to the codebase easily and feel confident about not introducing bugs. By choosing this language, they gave themselves a tool that can be easily adapted to their business goals at any given moment.
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Cardano
Cardano is a cryptocurrency platform developed by IOHK in collaboration with outsourcing software development teams. One of the components is Cardano SL, which was built in Haskell.
This layer is responsible for cryptocurrency circulation and coin distribution, and, therefore, has to process a large number of operations simultaneously and do it quickly.
Also, like any other cryptocurrency, it should be secure and error-proof. Haskell gave Cardano this speed advantage in processing transactions and increased the level of security for the entire system.
CentralApp
CentralApp is a SaaS platform aimed at helping small and medium-sized businesses to obtain a strong online presence. CentralApp is a large and complex system that demands numerous sub-systems to work together. They also host more than 1000 websites and have to deal with a high throughput system where performance is paramount.
In order to remain efficient, they need a codebase that is clean, functional, and easy to sustain. Haskell offers numerous pluses; due to static typing and its functional and pure nature, it results in concise and performant code. Also, different threads are well isolated with Haskell, which makes the language more trustworthy.
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 fault-tolerant systems to be built.
Haskell is proven by large corporations like Google and Facebook, as well as smaller companies like Riskbook and CentralApp. So, if your digital project belongs to the fields of blockchain, healthcare, web, or finance, where increased security is especially important, you will not regret choosing this language for your tech stack.
Research on blockchain development will help you understand blockchain development better. Don’t forget to read it before you start your next project!
