[Haskell-cafe] consulting and contracting

[Paul Johnson]

On 15/12/09 21:19, Anton van Straaten wrote:
>
> Without that advocacy, this client would have used Java by default.  
> As it was, the first of those two systems was developed in parallel 
> with a Java version, and we used the two versions to verify each 
> other's results.  For the second system, a Java version wasn't deemed 
> necessary, partly because the comparison succeeded in making Haskell's 
> advantages sufficiently clear.
>

Can you give us some more details on this dual-language project?  I'm 
trying to collect objective evidence of the relative advantages of 
Haskell and Java (or any other languages) and this kind of comparison is 
gold dust.  Very few companies are prepared to develop the same system 
twice.

SLOC counts are good objective evidence (preferably from a standard SLOC 
counter such as http://www.dwheeler.com/sloccount/).   Days of effort in 
development and defect counts are also powerful (although more subject 
to random noise: give several developers the same job and developer 
effort seems to vary even more than SLOC).  Also any specific anecdotes 
about changed requirements, defects discovered by QuickCheck can also be 
useful.  They are not objective evidence, but people listen to stories 
more readily than statistics.

Of course if you can reveal the client's name that would also be very 
useful, for the same reason.  But I understand that may not be possible.