Leaving Haskell behind

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I have only skimmed the article, but IMHO this is a pretty bad summary. (For those who want a summary, the reasons are also outlined in the article.)

Basically, the author's criticism is that the language is too powerful, too expressive, people try very abstract things, tooling is bad and no one cares about the language.

There is something sinister in this - first, in the author's lamentations about bad tooling. Other languages require linters, formatters, static analysers, etc. because the language's built-in features and type system are sub-par. In Haskell, that's not true, so the lack of "sophisticated" tooling is way less painful.

Second, this is similar to the "equalise things by dragging everyone down to the same level"-type of thinking. It "makes maintenance a chore" because the language allows you to be creative and shoot yourself in the foot! Sure, you can have languages like Go where the language is simple and it's hard to write "unreadable" code, but that comes at a cost of being very verbose, and not allowing for an opportunity to write really good code. Basically, enforced mediocrity. "Hard to maintain" is also used as an euphemism for "this is too complex and I can't be bothered to try to understand it" sadly. I find that quite ironic in the face of all the needless complexity in the software industry (just look at k8s, terraform plugins or the web development stack)... I know way too many programmers like that, who argue endlessly about what is the "most readable", which in practice just means to write the most straightforward, laziest, zero optimisation code, and giving themselves an excuse for that. Even if a less-capable language hinders development (either by making things non-verifiable like no proper optional/nullable handling or simply by making the code more verbose and/or less readable) their advocates justify it on the basis of being standard or "best practice". I think Haskell and similar languages intimidate similar people because they can't shrug and say "well the language can't do that" to justify their laziness, but would have to actually make a reason up to why they don't want to write sound, safe and performant programs.

Third, about backwards compatibility.... this is a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. On one hand, you have languages like C++ and JavaScript which are really backwards compatible, and have really sizable drawbacks because of it. Sure, your code will compile in 5 years most likely without changes, but the language as a whole suffers because of it. There should be a place for languages which are ambitious and aren't afraid to break things. Backwards compatibility is simply a design aspect, not some holy commandment you must adhere to all times.

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