avi 1 With sadness, I post:
Thoughts and discussion welcome.
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Thanks for posting your thoughts.
I wonder whether using GHCi is an answer to the slow feedback loop?
If Python is a viable alternative then I imagine runtime performance isn’t the biggest concern? Do you or the Scarf board or investors have big stakes in AI? jw
glhf with the AI python experiment! hf seems like the hard part, but you’re a Business so you can wipe those tears with your increased LoC
jaror 4 I don’t feel like you take our concerns about the harm of AI seriously at all. The post is basically seems to be saying “so long, and thanks for all the fish”, but if the dolphins were the ones paying for the hyperspace bypass and thus the demolition of earth. It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.
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Jappie 5 What a nice natural experiment, I’m eager to learn the results.
that’s kind of AI in a nutshell, right? Explore and gobble up the sum total of human thought and labor and then go terminally Exploit
and tbh “X is leaving Haskell” in a nutshell too.
the world is especially full of FUD and FOMO nowadays. doubly so if you work at a company adjacent to the SV zeitgeist. so to be a Haskeller who still codes in plaintext is not easy. it’s existentially stressful, even!
it takes guts to be amazing
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avi 7 This is a great point. We are notably not moving Scarf Gateway (our main performance-critical system) off Haskell. Python indeed would not be a good fit there.
However, for general purpose web APIs, runtime performance of the language has not been nearly as relevant for us, compared to things like DB performance. I think this is true for a lot of companies.
GHCI is certainly faster, But it still doesn’t remove this cost when you look at things like CI or doing a lot of parallel work.
avi 8 Nope. Scarf is cash flow positive and default-alive now. We are making the choices that work best for us!
avi 9 Fair point – I think these concerns are understandable. And I am not trying to refute them! I am ultimately more focused here on the pragmatism of our team’s technology choices than I am about making moral judgements about the people, orgs, and practices behind those technologies.