> Average people are lazy idiots and designing your language to appeal to them will result in a very popular incoherent mess, like Java and Ruby, and Dijkstra will make pointed remarks at you from his grave.
This is so funny
Yeah, Ruby and Java are not great. But they get the job done and produce value, and a lot of people use it.
I couldn't care less what Dijkstra thinks, he's not the one paying my bills
If you can see the value in Haskell great. But I find it hard to remember where are the big technology companies using Haskell (or tools built with it). Maybe because if you force 'mathematical consistency' in an inconsistent world everything else sucks
Sure. I'm a huge fan of bash scripts but I'm certain that attempting to enforce mathematical consistency on that language would be a comical disaster. (Although Gabriel Gonzales's "pipes" library for Haskell does make reference to a categorical interpretation of Unix pipes—hey, it's like this "math" stuff is quite widely applicable.)
Look up Facebook's use of Haskell if you're curious about industry use.
I worked for a startup that used Haskell for its entire backend, including a custom kind of graph database. I joined my coworkers to a Haskell hackathon in Zürich and met hundreds of people using the language commercially (and happily).
It's not that Java and Ruby suck—it's just that they're incoherent and messy. That may sound like slander but I have used both languages professionally, I have contributed to both Rails and the Ruby interpreter, I don't think they are bad tools. Everything is a tradeoff. If you CAN'T see the value in Haskell, I humbly recommend you look into it, but I can't force you to become interested.
This is so funny
Yeah, Ruby and Java are not great. But they get the job done and produce value, and a lot of people use it.
I couldn't care less what Dijkstra thinks, he's not the one paying my bills
If you can see the value in Haskell great. But I find it hard to remember where are the big technology companies using Haskell (or tools built with it). Maybe because if you force 'mathematical consistency' in an inconsistent world everything else sucks