How to Sell Excellence

> the first engine in Google was implemented (at least in part) in Python ;) Later they had the cash/resources to afford rewrites in C++/Java.

It seems Larry Page started trying to write it in Java then gave up and switched to Python for version one. Guess Python's easier, Java runs faster.

http://carlcheo.com/fascinating-posts-from-tech-founders-who...

Wordpress runs on PHP, therefore a majority of the internet is PHP, that's the whole story right there.

I'm shocked by your comment.

Lisp was a language that precisely gained great adoption due to the power it allowed to the individual programmer. The lack of syntax was it's biggest advantage.

Viable ecosystems coalesced around Lisp! Emacs? Lisp Machines? Tons of scientific software? Big AI projects? The whole open source revolution started due to the appeal of the commercial world for Lisp and it's success.

Lisp was a academic and commercial success. The reasons for its decline are multiple, and yet it even was able to come back as Clojure.

And then you have Haskell. A programming language created exclusively by and for the academia. I don't know if you realise that Paul Graham launched his startup using Common Lisp... at a time when Haskell was available as open source too. I'm just using Paul's name as an example of the large community of people who thought (and think) that Lisp languages gave them a productivity and power that couldn't be compared. You even have some commercial video games programmed in Lisp languages! (the famous and repeated example of Naughty Dog). Lisp in finances? Yeap, there are still system using it after many years. Remote probes in deep space? Check. So there must be something to Lisp that helped people to create reusable and maintainable code. And in all these cases it was individual geniouses who pushed for the use of Lisp.

I think that the problem with Haskell is the single promise of its type system. Every single language that boasts to have the silver bullet that will allow people to tame programming (what is nothing more than hard complicated work) has failed to gain adoption by some reason. Diminished returns, maybe. The world is complicated and single techniques that promise to solve everything tend to fall short to the promised benefits. So, how is Haskell going to help me with network protocols? To build better generic software? To interface with the IoT? To create better AI or explore data with Machine Learning? If the answer to these and other questions is "through a hard fully capable type system", then I cannot but laugh.

Then you have languages like R, that are gaining wild adoption in the academia (even if it's a "specific" language) because people feel powerful with them. They can achieve so much more with the same effort that it's a no brainer to use it. Code reuse? Yeah!!!! Thousands of libraries available that work like a charm. Ugly? As hell! but who cares? Oh yes, dogmatic showing-off aestetically/academic inclined posh programmers that represent a small part of the industry, they seem to care a lot (I include myself in this group). And yet smart people is using R every day to the point of forcing people like me (yes I programmed in Haskell in the past) to recognise that there must be something to it. A programming language that transfer a unseen amount of power to the normal user (even if it's an opensource copy of previous software).

As I said, I would like to be able to use the «I reject your reality and substitute my own» card... but after that many years I think that doing so would be just plain naîve.

PD: I would never put maintainability above power (power being defined as "now I can do X easily in half the time"), it seems to never work when it's achieved through "training" and "complexity" (as in for instance "large learning curve").

Be careful what you mean by 'mostly'. Though there may be many small outfits that use it for this particular features, there are others that use it very differently (and at completely different scales). Examples such as Facebook, Jane Street and Esper come to mind. There are likely many other companies who have less of a web-presence too (cf defence industries, as mentioned in the slide deck).

> If Java is a general purpose language (can't be used for systems without translation due to the JVM), then so is anything-which-compiles-to-JS.

Fair point. I guess my thinking here is that PureScript is unlikely to replace Haskell. It is possible, but I think there are a few reasons that probably won't happen. The first is that it's mission statement "PureScript is a small strongly typed programming language that compiles to JavaScript" points it in the wrong direction. Maybe Javascript is the counter to this, but that feels like an anomaly. Second is that it is way behind Haskell in terms of infrastructure, ecosystem, and a lot of core language/compiler features that enable general purpose programming. Could swarms of people come in and change this? Sure. But if they did, it seems to me that PureScript is similar enough to Haskell that people could just switch to Haskell and avoid that work.

> Until you can 'get work done' without the equivalent of graduate-level math classes

This is a big misconception that is demonstrably untrue. I know many people who have developed a solid working grasp of monads without doing graduate-level math.