[Haskell-cafe] Why Not Haskell?

[Donn Cave]

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 at drizzle.com