Compose NYC 2019
Speaker: Jeff Ciesielski and Lianne Lairmore
After struggling with global variables, mismatched types, and being constantly afraid to change any code for fear of runtime errors, our team decided to move a core piece of our robotics infrastructure from Python to a type safe language. After developing proofs of concept in Rust, OCaml, Crystal, Scala, and Go (and even getting close to a production candidate in Nim) an enterprising member of our team wrote a prototype in Haskell and the results were outstanding. With its emphasis on type safety, the elimination of global state, and an established library ecosystem, Haskell has been a great fit for our team. That said, our rollout wasn’t without hiccups! Once deployed we learned about space leaks and what lazy evaluation really means for continuously running software.
