CUFP 2011 Keynote: Pragmatic Haskell (Lennart Augustsson Standard Chartered Bank)

While it's not publicly available, there is a strict dialect of Haskell called Mu, owned by Standard Chartered. See [VIDEO] . It would be nice if the rest of us could play with it, but so it goes.

IIRC, Standard Chartered achieved this by initially adding Haskell interop to Excel[0] and then moving to a custom GUI solution to replace Excel altogether. [0]- [VIDEO]

I mean, if you want a direct quote from Lennart Augustsson, here's a quick transcription of the relevant parts of the relevant video. [VIDEO] > So strictness is really fantastic, I must say. Stack traces work. When something goes wrong, you can say "so you call things from there to there to there". It's the single most time saving thing from Mu compared to Haskell, because things do go wrong from now and then, and it's so great to know exactly what went wrong... And strict languages have what I call resource composition. So if you understand the complexity of 2 parts you can stick them together and nothing weird happens. They add up. That's not true in lazy languages. And debugging, it's sensible in strict languages. And exceptions, they actually work! Strictness is great. It's terrible, also. So it has nice resource composition but it doesn't compose nicely semantically. So laziness has some good things as well. I think laziness is a much nicer way of programming except for these pesky resources. You definitely need some lazy functions, even C has lazy functions. And then he goes on to talk about the ways that they allow laziness in a strict language, and when they need laziness. Screenshots of relevant slides. Considering that the report was pretty much a summary of the talks given at CUFP, I don't know why you would cast doubt on its legitimacy. [LINK] [LINK]

> their own dialect of Haskell called Mu. [emphasis mine] >Mu has a strict runtime, which makes program performance easier to analyse and predict – but prevents us from just copy-pasting some Haskell libraries that rely crucially on lazy evaluation. [emphasis mine] If Mu were an entirely different language then you wouldn't be able to copy-paste any Haskell libraries. See also e.g. here: [LINK] , [VIDEO]