How's Haskell Doing? Graphing Meetup Attendance in New York City

As a consultancy using Haskell for many new projects, one of the questions we’re often asked is, “how hard is it to find Haskell developers to support our projects?”

While I've often cited the strength of the New York City developer community as evidence of the number of developers interested in professional work in the language, I decided that it was time to quantify this interest and compare it against other language communities. In the graph below, we can see that based on Meetup attendance, Haskell is faring quite well against the community of developers in New York for less-functional languages such as Java and Ruby ¹.

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Compared to other “new” functional languages, such as Clojure and Scala, Haskell is comparing favorably in the New York programming scene. While the Haskell meetup is newer than the Clojure meetup, attendance started strongly and has been quite consistent since the formation of the group.

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Perhaps more interesting than these graphs, from the perspective of business owners looking to Haskell for commercial project development is our subjective impression of participants at the Haskell meetups. While the Ruby and Java Meetups tend to be full of developers currently working professionally in those languages, Meetups such as the Haskell meetup tend to be full of developers looking to switch from jobs in languages like Ruby and Java to work in Haskell. It’s hard to imagine a better place to be from a hiring perspective at the start of your next software project!