A Couple Million Lines of Haskell: Production Engineering at Mercury
Key takeaways
- Engineering rigour and artistic creativity are a fantastic combination, and this series aims to be the synthesis of these two aspects within the Haskell world.
- I was immediately, hopelessly enamored with the idea.
- I have been writing Haskell for nearly two decades now, and I still think the value proposition I fell in love with at sixteen was basically right.
The editors of the Haskell Blog are happy to announce a new series of articles called "Haskellers from the trenches", where we invite experienced engineers to talk about their subjects of expertise, best practices, and production tales.
Engineering rigour and artistic creativity are a fantastic combination, and this series aims to be the synthesis of these two aspects within the Haskell world.
I first heard about Haskell when I was sixteen, sitting in a high school computer science class where we were writing Java and learning, among other things, that NullPointerException was apparently a lifestyle choice if you decided to go into software development. While looking at the /r/programming subreddit after school, I stumbled across a reference to a language where null pointer exceptions simply could not happen, where the type system could prevent an entire category of bugs that I had been fighting with every week. Haskell. I was immediately, hopelessly enamored with the idea.