Many of the brightest programmers I've ever met have struggled to get their heads around Haskell. Enough of them that I don't think it's really a PR issue or a lack of good introductory materials. I'm wiling to take the claims on faith that Haskell's design eliminates a lot of common programming errors but I've been listening to predictions of Haskell's emergence into the mainstream for almost 15 years now and, from where I sit, I have to say it's never going to happen.
I used to be a bench chemist in a pharmaceutical company and the tools we used to develop new drug candidates and the tools we used to put them into mass production were radically different. I don't see why software should be any different. Let Haskell be the proving ground for new ideas and we can cherry pick the best ones for simpler languages later.
> I used to be a bench chemist in a pharmaceutical company and the tools we used to develop new drug candidates and the tools we used to put them into mass production were radically different. I don't see why software should be any different. Let Haskell be the proving ground for new ideas and we can cherry pick the best ones for simpler languages later.
This is a very interesting observation. I would hazard a guess that Phil Wadler developed (or at least significantly contributed to proving type-theoretic soundness of) Java Generics and Collections after they sort of proved their worth in Haskell world.
Same with Lambda which made its way to Java 8. STM is perhaps next.
I don't think the credit for the java implementation of 'Lambda' should go to Haskell pioneering it and proving it useful. First class functions were present in lots of other languages, most notably the lisp family long before.
I used to be a bench chemist in a pharmaceutical company and the tools we used to develop new drug candidates and the tools we used to put them into mass production were radically different. I don't see why software should be any different. Let Haskell be the proving ground for new ideas and we can cherry pick the best ones for simpler languages later.