On Wed, 2009-02-25 at 17:54 -0700, John A. De Goes wrote:
It's a chicken-egg thing. A Linux or OS X developer tries Haskell and finds he can write useful programs right away, with a minimum of fuss. But a Windows user tries Haskell and finds he has access to very few of the really good libraries, and even the cross-platform libraries won't build without substantial effort. As a result, I bet it's easier for a Linux or OS X developer to like Haskell than a Windows developer.
I use OS X exclusively myself, but I'll ensure my first published Haskell library is cross-platform compatible, because I think it's good for the community. The more people using Haskell, the more libraries that will be written, the more bugs that will be fixed, the more creativity that will be poured into development of libraries and the language itself.
I don't think this is founded in experience. The experience of the last 5 years is that the more people use Haskell, the more important backward-compatibility concerns become, and the harder it becomes for Haskell to continue evolving. Creativity being poured into a language doesn't do much good if the result is the language moving sideways, still less the language growing sideways. jcc