I think that is an unfair characterization of the video and the intent of Haskell's co-creator, based on the rest of your comment. Simon Peyton Jones makes a graph with two dimensions, useful/useless and safe/unsafe. The question he gets at is: how can one distinguish between effectful and effect-free computations in a programming language? He proceeds to characterize most useful languages as unsafe, and Haskell as useless but safe. He then spends the majority of the video talking about how useful languages are becoming safer, and at the same time how Haskell must become useful.
The famously friendly "Learn You a Haskell" book features its first "helloworld" program deep into the middle of the book, _after_ functors and (if I recall correctly) monads. It takes a very special beginner programmer to push that far through, working in the REPL, before they can write programs that do basic I/O.
I teach functional programming to college sophomores and juniors, and I would love to teach them Haskell. But I have to meet them where they are, and it would be difficult to do in Haskell. This is why we have taught either F#, Scala, or LISP over the years. F# in particular has a lot of the aesthetic qualities of Haskell while allowing impurity or mutability escape hatches without too much trouble. If somebody has truly beginner-friendly Haskell resources, I would love to hear about it-- I'm apparently not smart enough to chart that path myself.
It is important to clearly understand that Simon uses the word "useless" in the sense of having no side-effects on the external world i.e. if state changes are not reflected in the external world at some point then there is no practical purpose to it and hence "useless".
Functional languages solved this by using the type system at different levels to combine both effectful and effect-free computations cleanly.
Haskell can 100% be used to create all of these kinds of apps.
I think this article tries to figure out where can Haskell be the best.
As for a platform? If Haskell can offer the most secure, correct, and trusted web apps(the biggest platform), created with the help of LLM's, and they can use LLM's to make reading Haskell intuitive, that's a good place.
- Embedded toolchain and/or HAL/register map for my MCU family or CPU arhitecture
- A GUI library and/or basic I/O interaction library (keyboard/mouse to start)
- A GPU interaction library
- A web framework (Not going to roll my own DB interface, auth, user system, router, template system etc)
(Etc). I.e., some core library which handles the drudgery I can build my application on. If this is what you're getting at, this suggests a plan of attack!- Copilot (by NASA)
- MicroHs — for running Haskell on an MCU
GUI library and/or basic keyboard/mouse I/O:
- Monomer
- sdl2
- gi-gtk4
GPU interaction library
- OpenGL bindings
- vulkan bindnigs
- Accelerate — numerical GPU computation with an NVIDIA backend.
Web framework with database access, auth, users, routing, and templates:
- IHP
- Yesod