On Fri, 4 Aug 2006, Hans van Thiel wrote: ...
Are there other reasons why there seem to be just a few thousand (hundred?) Haskell programmers in the world, compared to the 3 million Java programmers and x million C/C++ programmers?
I can think of several other possible reasons - 6. Instability - available for 15 years, you say, but does the Haskell of 15 years ago support today's programs? Does standard Haskell even support today's programs? 7. Some difficult concepts, at a level that goes way beyond the commonly used languages. 8. Problems with evaluation model and space that other languages don't have to deal with. 9. Missing libraries and more, I suppose. I'm not saying any of these are necessarily compelling reasons not to use Haskell, but altogether, maybe another way to look at it is that it's really a strong statement when people decide to bet their livelihood on Haskell software development - it isn't the safe choice, and it means someone finds the reasons for it very compelling. Donn Cave, donn@drizzle.com