It is unscientific to ask the (highly biased) people on this list how to sell Haskell. A focus group of the target audience is clearly called for. Having said that, I will now violate my own advice. Knowledge of the audience is critical to the success of a presentation. Simon (aka Dumbledore) is speaking to four different Houses: scientists (Ravenclaw), engineers (Hufflepuff), entrepreneurs (Slytherin), and managers (Griffindor). My advice to him is: You have already won over the scientists. Stop priming the pump. Algebraic runes, spells from the Book of Category Theory, bananas, lenses, arrows, cata, ana, hylo, endo, all is vanity. You cannot interest the engineer with new tricks. He has spent too long mastering difficult tricks to work around limitations to want to see them eliminated. His competitive advantage and prized reputation are at stake. Get him to believe that he is on the verge of being "left behind". You cannot win over the entrepreneur with promises of "easier and more robust". This translates to "anyone can do it" and the valuable "trade secret" of arcane wizardry is now devalued. Show something exciting that cannot be done (or would never have been attempted) without FP. Monads, CPS, existential data types, or other high-priestess wizardry are no impediment (less competition from lesser peers). But marginal improvement is unimpressive. A new language brings high risk, and must have high reward. Examples must be powerful (not another prime number generator). Effective complexity management, correctness reasoning in concurrent/distributed processing, and so on will get their interest. Risk is scary for managers. "Great promise" promises the manager only headaches. This translates to "no one can be hired to do it" and "those that can will shake me down for more money". You must promote instead the *inevitability* of Haskell's success: the fact that Haskell has recently dominated the ICFP Programming Contest, the strongly upward trend of Haskell taught at universities (hopefully there is a strongly upward trend?), some anecdotal measure of the predisposition to relatively better "quality" of those who seek to learn Haskell. Allay the unspoken fear that there are always plenty of Haskellers to cause trouble in a company (design and implement great tasks), but never enough more mediocre Haskellers to keep out of trouble (content to do "maintenance" tasks and minor upgrades to existing software) by marketing Haskell as a recruitment tool to attract the best, a motivational tool to reenergize engineers (see above) who've let their skills go stale in larger companies, and a staff-development tool to spur internal friendly competition to modernize their skills (and excuse wage stagnation in those that do not). Since "inevitability" is a hard sell for Haskell right now, avoid mentioning ML or Erlang. There needs to be only one FPL for a manager, or he will fret about VHS vs. Betamax syndrome (and he won't want to have been the one to invest in a Betamax). Don't show any Haskell function with the prefix "unsafe". Even now, I find the name unsettling. The Harry Potter series makes money because we can't do magic but we want to. It is human nature that what is given away will never be thought to have value. Don't give away the magic of Haskell. Let the audience in on the secret that the Haskell wizarding world is doing great things with it for glory and profit, and others will steal the secret for themselves readily enough. If Simon can do all this, then he really is worthy of the name Dumbledore. :) Dan