[Haskell-cafe] Why Not Haskell?

[Brandon Moore]

Hans van Thiel wrote:
> Hello All,
> 
> I'm wondering why I can't find any commercial Haskell applications on
> the Internet. Is there any reason for this?
> I can think of the following possibilities only:
> 1) Haskell is too slow for practical use, but the benchmarks I found
> appear to contradict this.
> 2) Input and output are not good enough, in particular for graphical
> user interfacing and/or data base interaction. But it seems there are
> several user interfaces and SQL and other data base interfaces for
> Haskell, even though the tutorials don't seem to cover this.
> 3) Haskell is not scaleable for commercial use. This looks unlikely to
> me, but could this be a factor?
> 4) Haskell is open source and licensing restrictions forbid commercial
> applications. I haven't seen any such restrictions, but is this a
> problem for the standard modules?

I wonder, how many languages have you seen commercial applications 
written in? I suppose you mean the sort of applications that might be 
sold in stores. I think a more interesting question around Haskell is 
what it takes to succeed in writing an application in a relatively 
uncommon language, what aspects of popularity are actually useful, and
how you can compensate.

What languages have gotten big without being the main language for a 
popular operating system, or pushed really hard by a big company?
Then there are moderately popular languages like perl and Python, but 
are there lots of commercial application even in those?

Brandon