I still love Haskell, had dedicated several years to it while at the university. Was impossible to land a job with Haskell. Did some Scala but it’s in demise. F# and OCaml are extremely niche. Ever fewer opportunities and engineering management is convinced it’s impossible to hire functional programmers.
In this new AI-driven world, is there still place for such a luxury as functional programming?
I mean few people still code by hand, few read the generated code, models aren’t trained on functional languages, it’s inefficient token wise to use functional languages - while a lot become self-proclaimed software engineers overnight by just prompting LLMs.
Hiring for Haskell is very easy, unless you need to hire more than 100 people on the spot, or don't offer remote. I've been doing Haskell hiring for 10 years, with more than 50 interviews, the applicants are always great, each time we had to pick the best of multiple candidates.
Cannot confirm functional programming being inefficient token-wise, or worse at being generated than other paradigms. Claude is great at Haskell.
The difficult parts about Haskell, such as understanding type checker error messages, are gone thanks to LLMs.
Type-safe, side-effect free code degrades correctness a lot less under heavy LLM action in my experience.
Please note the "we had to pick the best of multiple candidates". Easy to hire haskellteers, but Haskell shops are not many. You would probably find more Clojure roles, but they are in decline.
jmaker · · focus · HN ↗
In this new AI-driven world, is there still place for such a luxury as functional programming?
I mean few people still code by hand, few read the generated code, models aren’t trained on functional languages, it’s inefficient token wise to use functional languages - while a lot become self-proclaimed software engineers overnight by just prompting LLMs.
nh2 · · focus · HN ↗
Cannot confirm functional programming being inefficient token-wise, or worse at being generated than other paradigms. Claude is great at Haskell.
The difficult parts about Haskell, such as understanding type checker error messages, are gone thanks to LLMs.
Type-safe, side-effect free code degrades correctness a lot less under heavy LLM action in my experience.
waffletower · · focus · HN ↗