# Haskell 287 Hacker News commenters recommended Haskell and 119 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 10 years (11 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** Recommended for its expressive, strict type system and elegant abstractions that catch bugs and keep code maintainable; critics cite slow compilation, a steep learning curve, and laziness pitfalls. ## Why people recommend it - Powerful type system catches bugs (10 comments): "The high level declarative nature and type driven development style of languages like Haskell also make it really easy for an experienced developer to review" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46583996)) "the language supports (enforces) good decision making; static typing w/ inference and a functional style as a first class concept" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49253206)) "If you used that or Haskell for a while in a non trivial way it will give you deeper insight into why types matter" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46409914)) - Elegant, abstract expression (5 comments): "Haskell still strikes me as more “ergonomic,” better suited to express abstractions, and just closer to the ideal of a language that helps the developer think." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49179461)) "The thing that's so elegant about Haskell is that it allows you to express programmatic constructs at a very abstract level." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48219625)) "my experience writing parsers in Haskell and handling error cases succinctly through functors was such a pleasant departure" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46613541)) - Easy to review and maintain (3 comments): "The high level declarative nature and type driven development style of languages like Haskell also make it really easy for an experienced developer to review" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46583996)) "Haskell strikes the perfect balance here, I've worked at companies with massive codebases where maintaining is still a breeze years later." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46859114)) "Purely functional code is easier to test because of its referential transparency and lack of shared state." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46211774)) - Good target for AI-generated code (3 comments): "other languages that follow a stricter/larger compile time regimen e.g. Haskell, OCaml, Idris, ATS, F* would be suitable as well for this kind of approach" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48065099)) "If the generated code uses a suitable programming language, like the safe subset of Haskell, then the risk is significantly lower." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46103070)) "Haskell is I think a great language for llms - just make everything as pure as possible and you are golden." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48284795)) ## What people warn about - Complex and hard for beginners (4 comments): "the maybe most wide used functional language (Haskel) has a very bad reputation about being unnecessary complicated and obscure" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47690404)) "Having an entire ecosystem seemingly more concerned about writing theses about type theory than with building usable libraries?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48181391)) "a new user having to juggle immutability, IO and monads all at once at the same time will be almost certainly impossible." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46098129)) - Slow compile times (2 comments): "Fast compile times is one of the most important qualities for developer productivity. It made Haskell a non-starter for many developers" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48860978)) "the glorious (almost almighty) Haskell compiler is too slow for the agent to iterate it's mistakes until it gets it right" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48860135)) - Laziness causes resource surprises (3 comments): "both positive (fusion, elegant expression of infinite structures) and negative (space leaks, reasoning difficulty about resource usage)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47852608)) "Problem specifically in Haskell is that you have to worry about implementing tail recursion to get efficient stack usage." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50219984)) "Laziness by default and Hindley-Milner type inference seem like mistakes that simply aren't going to get cleaned up." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48252036)) - Weak tooling and dependency sprawl (2 comments): "having experience in large commercial Haskell projects, I can tell you the web apps also suffer from the dreaded dependency explosion" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47079791)) "Haskell is top tier when it comes to syntactic and conceptual elegance. The biggest problem is tooling, I would say." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47955636)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Rust](https://hackerapproved.com/p/rust.md): 2039 recommend - [Go](https://hackerapproved.com/p/go-programming-language.md): 1254 recommend - [Python](https://hackerapproved.com/p/python.md): 1067 recommend - [Zig](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zig.md): 743 recommend - [TypeScript](https://hackerapproved.com/p/typescript.md): 574 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Haskell", https://hackerapproved.com/p/haskell/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).