If Haskell is so great, why hasn't it taken over the world? (2017)

I think it’s pretty safe to assume this limitation/problem affects almost nobody else, so not really relevant for most people.

Also: how do you run running Firefox and Chrome? Do you download and build the whole chain of dependencies and build tools needed to build and run those? And if so, why?

Interestingly, the comp-sci program at University of Maryland does start with a list-esque system. They start with a very basic language and slowly add new features throughout the first course.

i have railed/ranted (occasionally belligerently) about haskell after having a professional brush with it two years ago. haskell hasn't taken over the world because the community is haughty about haskell's giant warts. yes it's very welcoming and open to indoctrinating you on "best practices" but as soon as you diverge in the slightest (because someone before you diverged or because you need to do something unconventional) they're completely obstinate about how ugly the language/experience can get.

the most of obvious instance of this is point free form combined with overloaded operators combined with 8? arities. if you bring this up on r/haskell or #haskell you will get shouted down about how it's not best practices to abuse that so why even bother discussing because you can write unreadable code in e.g. python. this is absolutely true but the ugliest python is still clearer than the brainfuck homage that haskell turns into with stuff like

$$%%^^^ a b (@@@ c d) $$$ e f

the point here is not to rehash the debate but that no one takes this complaint seriously because elegant haskell is the one true scotsman and everyone else's haskell is irrelevant.

another obvious thing is the complete lack of good tooling. stack/cabal/cabal-sandboxes/another cabal thing that's been created since i stepped away last year. there's no ide because real programmers write code using butterflies flapping their wings so why would you need anything other than cobbled together vim/emacs plugins. wanna debug? set a breakpoint in ghc but you can set breakpoints in ghc only 20 calls deep! don't even get me started on how slow the compiler is. does anyone listen to these complaints? no. why? my hypothesis is that it's like a fraternity with a hazing ritual (combined with many serious cases of stockholm syndrome).

i think a fair comparison is rust (despite being imperative). linear types are probably as foreign as purity/immutability to people and yet rust has 10x more mindshare than haskell. why? because rust maintainers care about ergonomics!

i could go on but i'm sure i'll get responses that chastise for not sticking with it long enough or not putting in the work or something else when the reality is that it wasn't worth it - i wanted a strong type system and the price i had to pay for it was too high. plenty of other strongly typed languages (ocaml, rust, f#) without all of the pain of haskell and the intransigence of the community.

Let's say you write the best image decoder library for the next great image format, and everyone wants it on every device that is connected to the internet.

Writing it in haskell would mean that only haskell users, or people willing to link in a large runtime, could use it.

So, you write it in C or Rust, so anyone can link it in and not care what it was written in. Maybe also write a native Java version, because that can already run on billions of devices.

If you look at software at various scales, Haskell does a lot to get the finely grained and maybe even medium grained parts right and correct. Yet, I don't see a convincing value proposition for Haskell for the coarser grained scales. On that level, the benefits of Haskell as a language dont shine anymore as brightly, and this is an area that many teams struggle with.

And oh: Haskell's lazy evaluation is the reason why I wouldn't like to use it within the business context, introducing all kinds of weirdness I don't want to have in a business context.