Interview with Fabian Thorand @Channable. They use Haskell for a variety of backend services. The biggest one by far is their data processing system, which powers the import from our customers, manages the data storage, and applies the user-defined rules to the data before streaming it to other components in our backend which handle the actual connections to the third-party platforms. By Liam Mooney.
Haskell was first introduced as an experiment rewriting a component that was hitting the limits of what was possible in Python and the existing architecture (the full story is on our tech blog).
The main selling point is Haskell’s strong type system. It eliminates many types of runtime errors that we regularly see crop up in our Python code base (though it has gotten better since we use types in Python as well – via mypy). Additionally, it makes refactoring existing code a breeze: one can be sure that almost all required changes are caught by the compiler.
One big downside of Haskell that is noticeable in the daily development workflow is the lack of tooling. Fortunately, at least the “IDE” side of it improved quite a bit with the haskell-language-server project, which was a game-changer in terms of development convenience.
An underappreciated advantage of Haskell is also its great runtime system. It makes it very easy to add both concurrency and parallelism to your programs using lightweight threads. Something that is usually a lot harder to do in other programming languages if you didn’t design for it from the start. Good read!
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