this sounds like a nice non prescriptive direction. jose is a pretty cool dude. pre covid we theoretically were gonna poke a defining a memory model of ghc haskell c— / hs / core , but life intervened
Chair of the HF here -- things are going quite well, actually. We have great sponsors who come back year after year, the HF has been spending more to make infrastructure more reliable (e.g. for Hackage), and we've started a new event series focused on North America (https://haskell.foundation/events/2026-amerihac.html), which has been a great success!
Our metrics are also showing that Haskell usage is actually growing. So overall, can't complain!
What do you find about bringing it into production? Is it the actual language patterns or the tools? I've done Haskell in production for over a decade now so I am not sure what challenges newcomers face.
For example, one thing that is a friction point at my own job is knowledge of tooling for performance tuning and optimization. It's not that Haskell doesn't have this tooling, it's just not well-known.
The thought crosses my mind that Haskell may be uniquely suited for AI coding using a very small context window (cheap). Haskell encourages small functions and no global state. So you may be able to capture all the relevant context for editing a Haskell function within a few hundred or few thousand tokens. That would be better than some other languages. Plus the strong typing could help AI agents catch errors.
I have not played around with it to see how that plays out with agentic coding. But it does seem like an interesting idea.
I had a good experience extending the Elm compiler, written in Haskell.
AI did very good with it (both Opus 4.5 and GPT 5.4). It has a good time reasoning on compiler feedback and iterating for the reasons you mention.
But I still don't like Haskell and lisps for the very same reason: they don't scale.
Every single project out there needs to reinvent the wheel at language level (in form of compiler extensions or DSLs).
Makes the whole ecosystem hard to contribute and leverage.
People can keep saying how great lisps or Haskell are all they want, but the fact remains that very ugly languages everybody hates somehow can produce software so good that makes you adopting the language bearable.
There isn't a single software that makes me (personally) go "yeah, I want to learn Clojure/Racket/Haskell so I can use X".
Whereas stuff like Laravel or Rails or Redis or Unreal Engine can sell me on PHP, Ruby, C/Lua, C++ even though I'm not particularly fond of any of those languages.
Nice to see continued investment in the Haskell ecosystem. Long-term sustainability for niche but highly influential programming languages is incredibly important for the broader software community.
I found Haskell too difficult. They focus on a specific niche, so they won't be a mainstay programming language anyway, but even then when you ask people what are the real innovations or success stories per given year, say, 2025 or 2026, they almost never mention Haskell.
What kind of argument is that? Java is 31, Python 35 years old, and Lisp is almost 70. They all still being used. Come on, let's find something real to talk about.
"The principal goal is to dedicate most of the Foundation’s financial resources to technical work.....
To make this possible, the Haskell Foundation will remain without an executive director for the foreseeable future.
Instead of having a full-time employee in charge of fundraising, events, coordination, mediation and much more, we will split these responsibilities between the Board and a new, part-time role dedicated to the Haskell Foundation’s financial sustainability."
That only scales to a point. When there gets to be enough work, making it everyone's job ensures that it becomes nobody's job. Usually because one person was doing anyway in an informal capacity, and now they're overloaded.
Source, seen it play out in a non-technical nonprofit that after years of stagnation, went the other way of hiring executive staff to run the day to day stuff. And from currently being part of another organization that is flailing that way presently.
Chair of the Haskell Foundation here -- funny to see this on the HN front page!
Not mentioned in the update is that the Haskell Foundation is moving towards a model that already exists within the OCaml Foundation. The HF and OF have the same challenge: a shallow pool of (relatively) large sponsors.
Of course big successful firms have more money to contribute, and we are thankful for them. This move, whereby the HF will deploy more of its financial resources on technical challenges directly, is meant to attract the other 99.9% of firms using Haskell in production. Many firms, including my own employer, have a more tit-for-tat view of sponsorship.
If you have thoughts, or would like to get involved, do not hesitate to reach out to me! E-mail in bio
23 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 53.6 ms ] threadOur metrics are also showing that Haskell usage is actually growing. So overall, can't complain!
For example, one thing that is a friction point at my own job is knowledge of tooling for performance tuning and optimization. It's not that Haskell doesn't have this tooling, it's just not well-known.
Is there anything in particular you would need?
Slow build times, deployment to Linux when developing on macos still pain. Deployment is pain specially on commodity VPS.
Go is very easy to cross compile and deploy.
But Haskell is better for a few things, but I've hardtime deploying it
I have not played around with it to see how that plays out with agentic coding. But it does seem like an interesting idea.
AI did very good with it (both Opus 4.5 and GPT 5.4). It has a good time reasoning on compiler feedback and iterating for the reasons you mention.
But I still don't like Haskell and lisps for the very same reason: they don't scale.
Every single project out there needs to reinvent the wheel at language level (in form of compiler extensions or DSLs).
Makes the whole ecosystem hard to contribute and leverage.
People can keep saying how great lisps or Haskell are all they want, but the fact remains that very ugly languages everybody hates somehow can produce software so good that makes you adopting the language bearable.
There isn't a single software that makes me (personally) go "yeah, I want to learn Clojure/Racket/Haskell so I can use X".
Whereas stuff like Laravel or Rails or Redis or Unreal Engine can sell me on PHP, Ruby, C/Lua, C++ even though I'm not particularly fond of any of those languages.
To make this possible, the Haskell Foundation will remain without an executive director for the foreseeable future.
Instead of having a full-time employee in charge of fundraising, events, coordination, mediation and much more, we will split these responsibilities between the Board and a new, part-time role dedicated to the Haskell Foundation’s financial sustainability."
Sounds a great move in principle.
Source, seen it play out in a non-technical nonprofit that after years of stagnation, went the other way of hiring executive staff to run the day to day stuff. And from currently being part of another organization that is flailing that way presently.
Not mentioned in the update is that the Haskell Foundation is moving towards a model that already exists within the OCaml Foundation. The HF and OF have the same challenge: a shallow pool of (relatively) large sponsors.
Of course big successful firms have more money to contribute, and we are thankful for them. This move, whereby the HF will deploy more of its financial resources on technical challenges directly, is meant to attract the other 99.9% of firms using Haskell in production. Many firms, including my own employer, have a more tit-for-tat view of sponsorship.
If you have thoughts, or would like to get involved, do not hesitate to reach out to me! E-mail in bio