Enterprise Haskell at H-E-B
25 points by Hecate
25 points by Hecate
For you non-Texans out there, HEB is an institution. It might as well be another arm of the Texas state government. It’s enormous here.
Many of their stores have tortilleras in-store and their tortillas are legit for something made on such a scale.
Also they apparently use Haskell, so that’s neat!
Something of a regional Costco, would you say?
They really only do groceries stuff, no clothes or anything. But they’re definitely the best grocery store chain in Texas.
And why is it called HEB?
Well, when the Wegman brothers started a grocery chain they called it Wegmans. When the Hannaford brothers started a grocery chain they called it Hannaford Market. When Sam Walton started a grocery chain he called it Walmart. When Howard Butt took over the C. C. Butt Grocery from his mother and expanded it into a chain, he could have called the resulting empire Buttmart, but refrained.
This is really cool. Would be nice to see more of this.
A company like H-E-B went with Haskell? I'm legitimately shocked. As the article mentions, "haskell is not known for being an enterprise language" and yet it was selected to replace COBOL.
Today the velocity gap is narrower than it looks, since porting your favorite Go library to Haskell is the kind of mechanical work a coding agent does well. Unfortunately, rote translations like that may not take full advantage of the type system without clever prompting.
I don't understand how folks can write two sentences like this, back-to-back, and not see the problem :(
In fact, I wager that Haskell applications are prime candidates for chaos engineering. Because whole categories of trivial errors are compiled away, injecting infrastructure faults surfaces the genuine logic and resource failures of your system instead of the noise that would dominate a dynamically typed program.
That sounds like the most compelling reason to consider Haskell.