[Haskell-cafe] Market Place for Haskell development teams?

[Curt Sampson]

On 2009-09-29 13:18 +0200 (Tue), Alberto G. Corona  wrote:

> What is the vehicle that haskell can use to enter the mainstream?.

Actually, I have one more thought on that: wait.

I'd had the impression that Haskell was becoming fairly well known (if
not yet heavily used, in comparison to languages like Java), but I just
ran across some hard evidence for this.

In the 32 languages ranked on http://www.langpop.com/ , Haskell
consistently comes down near the bottom in the various rankings of
use. (But hey, we're not so weird we're not in there!) But if you look
down near the bottom, at the chart labeled "Normalized Discussion Site
Results," you'll notice that Haskell comes out sixth. Even trying to be
more fair to the mainstream, and changing the weighting to drop Lambda
the Ultimate completely (after all, they're just a bunch of academic
wankers, right?) and bring IRC down to a contribution of 0.5 instead of
1 (apparently those academic wankers have lots of time to chat online),
Haskell still comes out tenth, with a score over a third that of the
leader, Java, and close to half that of PHP and C (2nd and 3rd place,
respectively).

We've also got at least one undeniably good, production-quality compiler
(which is more than PHP or Ruby can say), and have sold many tens of
thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, of books. At this point,
I don't think many people (John A. De Goes excepted) are looking at
people writing major applications in Haskell as if they're aliens living
on another planet.

Haskell is in the mainstream already as far as being taken seriously;
most of the complaints I'm seeing seem to be grasping at the same kinds
of straws that the anti-Java guys were back in the late '90s. ("It's
hopeless if it uses garbage collection.")

We've even got our own over-hyped, under-utilized supposed benefit
("it's good for multicore").

The main whinging seems to be about libraries, of which we have "only"
1585 on hackage.

Compare with RubyForge, which has 2059 projects in "beta" or better
status, or 2961 if we include "alpha" as well. The Ruby Application
Archive has 1768 projects; I have no idea how much overlap there is, or
how many of these are real.

I think we just need to sit tight for a couple of years.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson       <cjs at starling-software.com>        +81 90 7737 2974
           Functional programming in all senses of the word:
                   http://www.starling-software.com