[Haskell-cafe] Haskell as a religion

[John Goerzen]

Andrew Coppin wrote:
> Don Stewart wrote:
>> I think of Haskell more as a revolutionary movement
> 
> LOL! Longest revolution EVER, eh? I mean, how long ago was its dogma 
> first codified? ;-)

Lisp has been around for how long now?  Measured in decades.   We don't
even have our version of a Symbolics machine yet!

> Basically, Haskell will never be popular, but its coolest ideas will be 
> stolen by everybody else and passed off as their own. :-(

Well, in a sense, if that happens, we would have won, right?  We'd have
created a situation where "paradigm shift" would mean more than just a
buzzword on some CEO's presentation slide ;-)

In another sense, isn't this what Haskell was explicitly created to do?
 (Combine ideas from a bunch of similar languages into one standard one)

Some ideas in Haskell are easy to integrate into other languages: see
list comprehensions in Python.  I don't see Perl picking up pervasive
laziness anytime soon, nor Python compile-time type inference.

-- John