Haskell dev discovers code can ship, experiences immediate existential crisis
Description
Screenshot of a tweet from the verified account “effectfully @effectfully · 17h”. The tweet text reads: “a Haskell developer learns that programming can be used to build a "product"”. Below the tweet is a paused video from a professional chess hall. In the foreground, a formally dressed player walks away from the board, hand on forehead in utter disbelief; in the background another player casually resets pieces. Branded panels read “NORWAY CHESS” and a digital scoreboard above shows “½-½”. The meme humorously compares the stunned chess grandmaster to a Haskell programmer suddenly realizing that code isn’t just for elegant type systems but for shipping real-world deliverables. It pokes fun at the functional-programming community’s academic leanings versus the hard reality of product-market fit
Comments
25Comment deleted
Looks like he just learned the IO monad can include quarterly earnings
After years of perfecting monad transformers and proving type safety theorems, discovering that the PM wants a CRUD app with a deadline is like finding out your carefully crafted Hindley-Milner type system just needs to validate email addresses and store them in Postgres
The moment a Haskell developer realizes that monads aren't just for academic papers and that 'IO' doesn't stand for 'Intellectually Obscure' but actually means you can ship software that interacts with the real world - complete with side effects, users, and revenue. It's the functional programming equivalent of discovering your PhD thesis could have been a startup all along, except now you have to explain to stakeholders why lazy evaluation is actually a feature, not a work ethic assessment
Nothing breaks a type theorist faster than learning ‘product’ isn’t cartesian but the IO one with customers, deadlines, and SLAs
Haskell dev discovers 'product' means shippable software, not just × in category theory
Product‑market fit isn’t a functor - you have to bind IO(Product) and handle the side effect known as “customers”
to be honest xmonad is built in haskell Comment deleted
it is actually widely used in legal tech Comment deleted
who would need that? Comment deleted
just use online tools Comment deleted
I added ur gif Comment deleted
I mean. I just woke up. you can transform it locally. but why would you need haskell to use pandoc? Comment deleted
this doesn't make any sense Comment deleted
okay, that doesn't matter, still, what does it have to do with legal tech? Comment deleted
tbf I've never seen any type of person more averse to technology than legal personnel Comment deleted
imagine same structure replacing many problems of regular programming https://philipnilsson.github.io/Badness10k/escaping-hell-with-monads/ Comment deleted
ahm. okay. they can use whatever tool they want to do so that's not what I meant by legal tech. it's just doc format transformation. nothing to do with legal tech, it's a common task for various fields of topics Comment deleted
yes, but doc transformation isn't specific to legal tech Comment deleted
it's like to say — legal tech is pdf reader because they need to read pdfs. well. that's for sure but unspecific to this field only. so it's just a bad pic of task Comment deleted
what we do is: there are frameworks built in haskell to define a set of rules, which are needed be achieved by a set of laws and / or beureaucratic routines, they can be highly complex to program in explicit greedy style it's much easier to define them just one by one as they are, and let haskell wire them together in a correct order and flow. with that you can i. E. generate complex ready made documents and applications which would take months of work if done by hand, or calculate what else is needed to achieve a specific outcome. Comment deleted
That's great insight tbh, thank you Comment deleted
So you're using Haskell to model rules declaratively, let the compiler handle flow, and auto generate complex outputs? That’s clean AF. Bureaucracy as code, but make it elegant Comment deleted
don't write bad code write good code I get it gal. thanks for advice, without you, I could never come to this idea. Comment deleted
You are welcome Comment deleted
This reminds me a big bug that maintainer of Darcs said it cannot be fixed because of complexity. Comment deleted