Peter Verswyvelen wrote:
Well, IMHO the only reasons why Haskell is not a language for the masses are:
- No marketing. If a company as big as Microsoft would decide that Haskell is to become the standard language, then it would be so.
See, for example, Java...
- Ancient IDEs.
Can't comment. Every IDE I've used recently sucked anyway. ;-)
- As Haskell is currently used a lot by people with an average IQ of 160, the available packages and programming approaches are not easily absorbed for the average software engineer with an IQ of 120 ;-) However, once you take your time to dig deep into the matter, one often sees the beauty behind it. But many newbies just feel really stupid when they look at Haskell code :) I certainly did and still do, but fortunately I know I'm not very clever, so that's okay ;)
I have an IQ of 103. Apparently. (This makes me officially the most stupid person on the povray.off-topic newsgroup...)
- I haven't looked at the debuggers, but I've heared Haskell is really hard to debug.
OTOH, Haskell requires less debugging in the first place. ;-)
Anyway, although my IQ is far below 160, I find Haskell the most exciting language I have ever learned (and I've only scratched the bare surface of the language)
Indeed. Personally, I don't *want* Haskell to be a research language. I want Haskell to be The Next Big Thing. I want to see newspapers full of people trying to recruit Haskell programmers rather than all this C / C++ / Java stuff. ;-) Still, it will never happen... Would be nice if I could convince people that Haskell isn't just for idiots though.