It's unfortunate that languages can't gain much traction in the mainstream. Rust, Haskell, Julia, Go, Clojure, Scheme...
I remember the fight that it took before Python and Ruby were accepted. There's the big catch-22, of course, in order to obtain critical mass.
Maybe if we all adopted a language for our weekend projects, we'd contribute enough back through blogging and StackOverFlow questions that we'll add enough knowledge, etc to the net, that it'll become increasingly easier for the next person.
I'd say Go is becoming mainstream pretty quickly. I think Clojure isn't far away and Rust is showing big promise. I doubt based on probably under-informed personal observation that Haskell, Scheme or Julia will ever become widely adopted.
The thing with niche languages such as Haskell is that not everybody has to use them, but we ideally would get to enough critical mass that the ecosystem is sustainable, new and better tools are continuously being developed, and it's pretty beginner friendly. Clojure is probably at that stage right about now, Haskell doesn't quite feel that way, but it's getting better (more docs, guides, books, services like Stackage etc)
Basically it's very nice when a language gets enough traction that the lack of users is no longer a concern for its long term prospects.
Maybe if we all adopted a language for our weekend projects, we'd contribute enough back through blogging and StackOverFlow questions that we'll add enough knowledge, etc to the net, that it'll become increasingly easier for the next person.
Btw, I'm using Go for my weekend web site project: http://thespanishsite.com