Experienced it. Sound was very eerie. House shook a little. Was raining and thought it was thunder, but there was no other thunder after. r/boston has a bunch of ring footage of you want to hear the boom
I chose it due to the type system. Nearly every piece of data is optional. I need to compose these pieces of data to form a full set and apply that set of rules to a system. Haskell made a lot of things work out really well:
* embedded DSL for describing things with minimal syntax
* types to enforce my invariants
* immutable data + STM to protect my shared data structures
* multithreaded/async code is easy to work with
* deterministic outputs given inputs
but it was headaches in a lot of ways:
* exceptions - still not sure I’ve handled all exceptions gracefully
* culture - most teammates are intimidated by Haskell (and types)
* ecosystem is behind (Rust has exponential usb acceleration vs Haskell’s constant pace)
While I’m proud of the outcome I would have chosen differently now that I’ve seen the other side and have the project done. The inertia I was fighting required far too much energy
A different take -- drugs. Especially marijuana and hallucinogens. Helped me better understand how to think about abstract computations vs the nitty gritty details like pointers. Not for everyone, but helped me.
Then you've never been bitten by bugs in the runtime. I wait a few point releases (or when I see the runtime bugs stop being fixed) to start using a major version.
FWIW, I'm keeping your name in the back of my head for when my current company inevitably fails at their big data revolution. Biggest product produces 10-15 PB/day that must be processed. Our existing solution is 20 years old and relies on navigating C code with function line counts on the orders of 10k. Rust would've saved me a lot of time from living in gdb.