My inner social psychologist, shameless amateur that he is, is not at all ready to pronounce the syntax to be the problem with nearly as much confidence as you do.
As far as I can tell, the only languages with Haskell-like syntax that have tried for serious industry adoption are Haskell, Scala, and perhaps Elm. (Idris is a borderline case, but it’s young and in any case I think we’re still a couple generations away from viable total languages.) Each of these has unconventional and similar semantics, different but complex type systems, and is trying for general applicability, while Nix has somewhat different semantics and no static type system at all, and is also trying to cover a very limited application area. Even Nix’s syntax, to my eye, is about as ML-like as it is Haskell-like.
How can we be so sure it’s the syntax, specifically, that is the problem? Are we controlling for these differences in any way at all?
It would be another matter if F# or OCaml or even Dylan was a runaway success while Haskell was not; while strict vs lazy is a hell of a difference I could be convinced that the syntax is the problem if people from the industry tried one after the other and consistently backed off in disgust, but that is not happening as far as I can tell.
I really don’t see how the verdict here could be anything but a definite “inconclusive”.
Finally, I’m also not seeing why I want industry acceptance. (I don’t think Xe’s post discusses it at all.) I want to use it, I want other users to discuss it with, I want it not to die a slow unmaintained death in five to ten years, but otherwise... Meh?
Advocating it to a single organization seems like a limited task (which I might fail), but advocating it to “the industry” seems like arguing with a force of nature (and I will fail). There would be some advantages to me if it were adopted, but then again it’s a first-generation system that has already accumulated substantial legacy cruft, so maybe I don’t want it to be adopted as it is now? Exploring the solution space? Definitely. Adoption at this particular stage? Not really sure, hard to get worked up about it.
P.S.
>> even “I don’t think it looks pretty” would afford more respect on my part
> My opinion on Haskell syntax, and whether or not you respect my opinion, is also pretty much irrelevant [...]
Wrong kind of “respect”, sorry: not how much I trust it, but how much concrete information I can expect to squeeze out of it (complete trust helpful, but neither necessary not sufficient). Opinions of large groups of people, even if reliably known, are notoriously hard to turn into actionable insights.