In Gizra, we run an unusual stack. Drupal, our bread and butter, serves as the backend and is complimented by Elm for the front end, and as of recently Yesod - a Haskell framework.
Before Yesod, we were running NodeJs as our proxy server for light tasks or real-time messages.

But ever since I came across Elm, Javascript and I are hardly friends. I respect it, but can no longer turn my eye from its shortcomings. Functional programming has caught my heart and mind.

In this post I’m not going to try and present strong points on why you should adapt this stack, but rather share with you the unique path we are paving.

Elm

Elm was my first dip into the functional programming (FP) world. I recommend starting from there. It’s way more gentle than Haskell, and it has, of course, one important advantage - it helps you build rock solid, crazily fast, joy-filling, web apps.

Maybe this post and video will get you excited as well.

Gentle Intro to Haskell

A good way to start explaining what’s so special about Haskell is to dive directly into Haskell. While PHP is defined (by some) as a “productive” language, Haskell is often blamed (by some) as being an “academic language”. Both statements are probably wrong.

Often when mentioning Haskell, we talk about the compiler and the type system. They are truly marvelous tools. For the type system, I think the Elm post I lined above should be enough to get the hang of it. But I’d like to continue and reveal a bit more by highlighting mini examples on how Haskell makes us approach development tasks differently.

Lists

Below are examples from the REPL (the interactive shell for Haskell)

<span class="o">&gt;</span> <span class="p">[</span><span class="mi">1</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="mi">2</span><span class="p">]</span> <span class="o">++</span> <span class="p">[</span><span class="mi">3</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="mi">4</span><span class="p">]</span><span class="p">[</span><span class="mi">1</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="mi">2</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="mi">3</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="mi">4</span><span class="p">]</span>

What we have here are two lists of integers that are appended to each other. A list of integers is represented as [Int] in Haskell. The ++ is the operation that causes those two lists to be grouped into a single one.

Haskell comes with some handy shortcuts.

Continue reading…