What is Haskell?

Haskell is a general-purpose, statically-typed, and purely functional programming language. It is designed for teaching, research, and industrial application. Haskell was named after Haskell Curry, a mathematician and logician widely known for creating combinatory logic, the key to functional programming.

The Haskell language always represents programs as mathematical functions. It is mostly used in research and academia. However, it is also used by several companies. This technology is used in a variety of fields, such as aerospace, defense, web start-ups, and social media.

 

Features

Statically typed: In Haskell, every expression has a type, which is determined at compile time. All types formed by function applications must match. Without matching types, the compiler will reject the program. Types become not only a form of guarantee, but also a language for expressing programs.

Purely functional: There is no such thing as a “pure” function in Haskell. IO operations are nothing more than instructions produced by pure code.

Type inference: The types in a Haskell program need not be explicitly written out. The types are inferred by unifying every type bidirectionally. It is possible, however, to write out or ask the compiler to generate your types.

Concurrent: Due to its explicit handling of effects, Haskell lends itself well to concurrent programming. Many useful concurrency primitives and abstractions are provided in its flagship compiler, GHC.

Lazy: It is impossible for functions to evaluate their arguments. Therefore, programs can compose very well, and control constructs (such as if/else) can be written just by writing normal functions. Haskell code’s purity allows functions to be chained together, resulting in improved performance.

Packages: With a wide variety of packages available on the public package servers, open-source contribution to Haskell is very active.

 

Who Should Use Haskell?

There are many reasons why this language is appealing, such as its cleaner, more reliable code. Haskell is attractive for a wide variety of industries thanks to its short development time and tight control of side effects. This language has particularly attracted companies that work with large data sets.

In general, this is a language that can be applied to a wide range of applications. As the need for safe, scalable, and reliable solutions increases, its popularity continues to grow. Growing industry demand is one of many reasons developers should know how to code in Haskell. However, knowing this language can also help developers become more efficient at their jobs.

 

Career Scope

Learning Haskell gives you the shortest path to a programming job. There are numerous opportunities to become a Haskell professional, and the knowledge of Haskell can open up several doors, but from a payment point of view, other popular programming languages stand above Haskell.