How do you use Haskell at work?
Haskell is a beautiful language. I love Python too, but I fell in love with Haskell at first glance.
However, my problem is that I don’t know how to make use of it. Of course, I am definitely an amateur in programming, having had some programming courses in Uni, but mainly relied on internet resources. But I can figure out more ways of using Python.
So far, what I can do with haskell is to use it for office automation. Yeah, I kinda of use it the same way I used python.
I am a actuarial student, most of my stuff is in Excel; for actuarial computing, we use specialized actuairal software. How can I use Haskell in a more meaningful way?
How do you use Haskell? Especially when you are not a programmer. Thanks to whoever shares.
Actuarial Programming 
Huh, I’m assuming by your address that you’re an actuary. I can’t believe that there’s *another* actuary in the world who uses Haskell! It saved me from some evil GLM software a few times at work. I’ve left that job since, but it was good times. Almost wrote a full blown rating engine in it (project scrapped of course).
Good luck, hope to hear more!
Michael
July 13, 2009 at 6:08 pm
Hey, great to know you. I actually went to your website, and read your resume; impressive! Are you taking the SOA exams? Me too!
n0ne
July 14, 2009 at 12:06 am
Hi, I’m in the same situation as you. I’m a computer engineer and basically a programmer, but I work in the Internal Audit department of a large financial institution. So, no room to make use of Haskell.
Anyhow I like it, because I’m free to explore the language as I want and write some application for my self from time to time…
Cristiano Paris
July 13, 2009 at 7:10 pm
I totally understand what you mean! But we shouldn’t give up hope, one day our *special* skill (if I do have) will bring us glory…. ha ha ha, even if it doesn’t, at least it brings joy.
n0ne
July 14, 2009 at 12:15 am
I’ve used it to calculate a subnet list that encompasses a list of IP addresses.
Drew Vogel
July 13, 2009 at 9:51 pm
Thanks for sharing Drew!
I did some simple staff too. My work is mainly in number crunching, and I will write small programs to do stuff like comparing data, or calculating certain statistics (which can also be done in Excel, but I sort of like it the scripting way.)
n0ne
July 14, 2009 at 12:12 am
I’m in Computational Biology. I use haskell to join/filter/aggregate data in large flat files (flat files are everywhere you turn in comp bio). I’m thinking of writing more real analysis code in haskell too though.
Keith
July 14, 2009 at 12:37 am
woh, computational biology, sounds pretty cool. Nice to meet you, Keith.
n0ne
July 14, 2009 at 1:23 am
I’ve written a simulator for a lower level piece of software in a system so I could make progress with developing an Erlang application before hardware was ready.
The Haskell application uses lots of textual parsing, some CSV stuff, and Haskell forkIO style threads with typed data channels for concurrency.
I am hoping to use it for some future projects as well, as there’s some pretty complex stuff coming up that needs to be written very quickly to meet deadlines, pretty much ruling out C/C++.
Dave
July 14, 2009 at 3:28 am
I’m using it to control automated microscopes, plus all of my day to day computation and tinkering as a scientist.
Frederick Ross
July 14, 2009 at 4:44 pm
Cool~
n0ne
July 14, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Have a look at Mucrosoft F#:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/fsharp/
Dukeswharf
July 14, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Hello, I just saw this blog post on HWN. I have a story to share with the group.
At my prior job I ended up in a situation of having to salvage a project that abruptly lost 2 of its 3 developers. We were not permitted to hire any replacment personnel to do the large amount of remaining work. Work not even designed or started. And all of this was needed in a very short period of time, about a month.
Left in this situation of being asked basically “can you work us a miracle?”, I tried to see it as an exciting opportunity and got to work hacking things out with Haskell. I was able to meet the deadline working night and day, sometimes from home, and through weekends.
The project was processing copyright violation complaints at AT&T Network Security. I designed it as a set of daemon programs running in Linux and communicating through MySQL. The MySQL part was mandated from higher up. Data came to me as XML in email messages. Some web service XML-RPC client work was needed to look up customers for a specific IP address and time. Ultimately, one of the daemons was responsible for constructing and sending warning emails to the customers about bad behavior.
I was able to leverage a number of Haskell tools and libraries for this including HXT, template (text replacement, not TH), hsql, http, mtl, stm, hsemail, hslogger and a lot more. It was a fantastic learning experience. Very helpful to have many things work correctly with less bug fixing time.
dino
August 8, 2009 at 10:30 pm
I am an actuary and I think erlang, ocaml and ruby make a deadly combination for actuarial work. However it is really difficult to use them on the job.
jabran
April 17, 2010 at 5:49 pm