On 8/26/07, Stefan O'Rear
Actually, we aren't. You might not have been able to tell, but a core goal of our community is to stay small and avoid success at all costs; our language is not practical, not designed to be practical, and if it ever becomes practical, it will have done so only by a terrible streak of bad luck. Remember, success breeds inertia, and inertia would ruin our fundamental goal of being an agile research language.
Yes! We agree :-) Can someone please do something about the horrible paragraph at the end of this page here: http://www.haskell.org/complex/why_does_haskell_matter.html , which is what inspired my rather passive/agressive attitude to the Haskell community ;-) "Another reaso for the lack of Haskell, and other functional languages, in mainstream use is that programming languages are rarely thought of as tools (even though they are). To most people their favorite programming language is much more like religion - it just seems unlikely that any other language exists that can get the job done better and faster. There is a paper by Paul Graham called Beating the Averages describing his experience using Lisp, another functional language, for an upstart company. In it he uses an analogy which he calls "The Blub Paradox". It goes a little something like this: If a programmer's favorite language is Blub, which is positioned somewhere in the middle of the "power spectrum", he can most often only identify languages that are lower down in the spectrum. He can look at COBOL and say "How can anyone get anything done in that language, it doesn't have feature x", x being a feature in Blub. However, this Blub programmer has a harder time looking the other way in the spectrum. If he examines languages that are higher up in the power spectrum, they will just seem "weird" because the Blub programmer is "thinking in Blub" and can not possibly see the uses for various features of more powerful languages. It goes without saying that this inductively leads to the conclusion that to be able to compare all languages you'll need to position yourself at the top of the power spectrum. It is my belief that functional languages, almost by definition, are closer to the top of the power spectrum than imperative ones. So languages can actually limit a programmers frame of thought. If all you've ever programmed is Blub, you may not see the limitations of Blub - you may only do that by switching to another level which is more powerful." The author of this paragraph fails to realize that the Blub Paradox cut both ways ;-) Anyway, there I've said it, so that's out of the way perhaps :-D