
As a working engineer, one of my greatest frustrations is my inability to use Haskell in the workplace. The unfortunate fact is that my media industry clients use mostly Windows, some Macs, and no linux except for servers. The core system works everywhere, but many contributed libraries don't. GUIs are the big showstopper. One of the reasons Java won out over Common Lisp is that it had huge libraries. Franz's libraries were superb but few in number. One diehard Lisp user converted his lab to Java because "Java gives you everything you want, for free." That languages are distinct from their libraries escapes a lot of people; they see each language as a package. I met a COBOL programmer recently (I'm not making this up) that was looking into Java. He didn't see how people could use it, he said, because it had "thousands of commands". I'll stop whining now.