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Every language has a catalyst that pushes it from obscurity into mainstream use. Whether it be a project (Ruby on Rails), a programmer (Linus Torvalds -> C), a

Every language has a catalyst that pushes it from obscurity into mainstream use. Whether it be a project (Ruby on Rails), a programmer (Linus Torvalds -> C), a company (Google -> Python), or a library (Boost -> C++), there is always a force behind adoption. Most languages undergo a "fad period", where it's hip and cool to write in it and people just do it because other people do it. Clojure is going through this right now, as are Scala and (arguably) Haskell. We'll just have to see. I honestly hope Haskell becomes popular. Judging by http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/haskell.php http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/haskell.php, performance really isn't an issue. It's more of just an issue of programmer adoption and a willingness to throw yourself out there to spend some time to learn how to think outside of the imperative programming box.

nvoorhies 16y ago
I must be parsing this incorrectly because it looks like you're arguing that C was obscure before Linus used it.
- theli0nheart 16y ago
  You're not. I want to add that he was just the first guy that popped into my head when I thought C. I questioned it at first too, but the more I thought about it, Linux itself could have just as well have been written in Pascal or Lisp. If it had been, perhaps a lot of the tools, drivers, etc that interact with Linux would've been written in that language as well? Perhaps a better example is needed.
  - kmavm 16y ago
    C was never obscure in the way that Haskell is now and C++ once was. It was popularized by the project for which it was invented: UNIX, of which Linux is a two-decades-late clone. C's prevalence has always been closely tied to that of UNIX.
    - arethuza 16y ago
      Not sure about that - I seem to remember reading some stuff from the mid/late seventies that was pretty skeptical about the whole idea of using a comparatively high level language for OS development. Similarly, I don't think C++ was ever obscure in that it was widely publicized as the "next" C and people were pretty keen to use it - it was more that the early tools for C++ failed to live up to the initial promise.
  - dandrews 16y ago
    Let's not fixate on the examples, folks. Perhaps they're arguable, but the original point is still valid: languages gain traction through prominent projects.
    - silentbicycle 16y ago
      Right, and C was an obscure reddit in-joke until Linux came along and gave it an air of legitimacy.
    - roel_v 16y ago
      Yeah, let's take a position in a discussion, defend it by examples (a questionable tactic, but let's roll with it for now), and then when someone picks apart the examples say 'let's not fixate on the examples, folks'? (not attacking the OP, I'm not convinced yet one way or the other on the topic, just saying that when someone is called on his arguments and methodology the refutation in an intellectually honest discussion shouldn't be vigorous hand waiving).
- tjr 16y ago
  I am similarly puzzled at the implication that C++ was obscure prior to Boost, given that C++ was pretty well entrenched in both industry and academia by the time work on Boost began in 1998.
watmough 16y ago
This reddit post tells me why Haskell isn't that popular. http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/cs54i/how_would_you_write_du_in_haskell/ http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/cs54i/how_would_you... Writing a quick directory traversal function should be a no-brainer in any reasonably general-purpose language. The fact that the above reddit thread is jam-packed with the ins-and-outs of doing this simple task in Haskell tells me that Haskell may be great for some things, but it's probably not general-purpose, or a great fit for anything close to the heavy I/O, streaming, processing sorts of code I write. I actually own Real World Haskell, and have tried off and on to get into it, but I found that Clojure 'took' in my brain 1000x more easily than Haskell. It's a real bitch, because I'd love to be able to say I can write Haskell, but gosh-darn it, I just can't. Grrr. Sigh. quick edit: in answer to your point about a 'killer app' for Haskell, the parsec parser-combinator library looks bloody brilliant. Maybe if I run across a parsing need, maybe it'll help me get something useful out of Haskell, but I suspect my brain just doesn't get on with the Haskelly/MLy languages.
- derefr 16y ago
  What most other languages do, though, is exactly equivalent to Haskell's unsafePerformIO. If you want to interact with your environment in possibly-destructive ways (and sending a message out of the runtime, whether to the network or the OS, always has the possibility of being destructive, because you can never guarantee what a system not under your control will do in response to your message), just accept the reminder that it's not functional/idempotent/memoizable/whatever else, and do it. This is going to sound like an odd analogy, but saying "I won't use Haskell because I want to do IO, but don't want to unsafely do IO", makes you sound like a person playing a fighting game who blames their loss on the game not being "fair." If you're playing to win[1], and there's an "unfair" tactic, you use it yourself. If "cheating" at Haskell lets you do a higher-quality job, faster, than either using a different language or "playing Haskell as it was meant to be played" (i.e. being a scrub) then why not? [1] http://www.sirlin.net/ptw http://www.sirlin.net/ptw
  - Confusion 16y ago
    Except that it's not necessary, because at least 3 solutions that don't use unsafePerformIO were posted to that Reddit thread.
Lewisham 16y ago
To expand on this, and on the OP, one thing that you need after the force is momentum. I strongly feel that if Ruby was just Rails, it would have petered out by now (maybe people might have even gone back to Perl and CPAN). I think that GitHub may well be the driving force behind Ruby at this point. GitHub gems are pretty decent, but like the OP points out, Haskell packages aren't.
- nex3 16y ago
  GitHub no longer builds or serves gems.
  - Lewisham 16y ago
    Well, what I mean is they're developed on GitHub, then released to RubyGems.
smcl 16y ago
Was C really obscure before Linus Torvalds released\popularised linux? I'm fairly young so I have no knowledge of this, but it feels wrong. edit: just noticed a discussion about this exists already. That'll teach me to read all the comments in future :)
jacquesm 16y ago
I think giving Linus Torvalds the credit for pushing C into the mainstream is a bit much. Long before Linus came along C was the programming language of choice for anything from games to operating systems and so on.

nvoorhies 16y ago

I must be parsing this incorrectly because it looks like you're arguing that C was obscure before Linus used it.

theli0nheart 16y ago
You're not. I want to add that he was just the first guy that popped into my head when I thought C. I questioned it at first too, but the more I thought about it, Linux itself could have just as well have been written in Pascal or Lisp. If it had been, perhaps a lot of the tools, drivers, etc that interact with Linux would've been written in that language as well? Perhaps a better example is needed.
- kmavm 16y ago
  C was never obscure in the way that Haskell is now and C++ once was. It was popularized by the project for which it was invented: UNIX, of which Linux is a two-decades-late clone. C's prevalence has always been closely tied to that of UNIX.
  - arethuza 16y ago
    Not sure about that - I seem to remember reading some stuff from the mid/late seventies that was pretty skeptical about the whole idea of using a comparatively high level language for OS development. Similarly, I don't think C++ was ever obscure in that it was widely publicized as the "next" C and people were pretty keen to use it - it was more that the early tools for C++ failed to live up to the initial promise.
- dandrews 16y ago
  Let's not fixate on the examples, folks. Perhaps they're arguable, but the original point is still valid: languages gain traction through prominent projects.
  - silentbicycle 16y ago
    Right, and C was an obscure reddit in-joke until Linux came along and gave it an air of legitimacy.
  - roel_v 16y ago
    Yeah, let's take a position in a discussion, defend it by examples (a questionable tactic, but let's roll with it for now), and then when someone picks apart the examples say 'let's not fixate on the examples, folks'? (not attacking the OP, I'm not convinced yet one way or the other on the topic, just saying that when someone is called on his arguments and methodology the refutation in an intellectually honest discussion shouldn't be vigorous hand waiving).
tjr 16y ago
I am similarly puzzled at the implication that C++ was obscure prior to Boost, given that C++ was pretty well entrenched in both industry and academia by the time work on Boost began in 1998.

watmough 16y ago

This reddit post tells me why Haskell isn't that popular. http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/cs54i/how_would_you_write_du_in_haskell/ http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/cs54i/how_would_you... Writing a quick directory traversal function should be a no-brainer in any reasonably general-purpose language. The fact that the above reddit thread is jam-packed with the ins-and-outs of doing this simple task in Haskell tells me that Haskell may be great for some things, but it's probably not general-purpose, or a great fit for anything close to the heavy I/O, streaming, processing sorts of code I write. I actually own Real World Haskell, and have tried off and on to get into it, but I found that Clojure 'took' in my brain 1000x more easily than Haskell. It's a real bitch, because I'd love to be able to say I can write Haskell, but gosh-darn it, I just can't. Grrr. Sigh. quick edit: in answer to your point about a 'killer app' for Haskell, the parsec parser-combinator library looks bloody brilliant. Maybe if I run across a parsing need, maybe it'll help me get something useful out of Haskell, but I suspect my brain just doesn't get on with the Haskelly/MLy languages.

derefr 16y ago
What most other languages do, though, is exactly equivalent to Haskell's unsafePerformIO. If you want to interact with your environment in possibly-destructive ways (and sending a message out of the runtime, whether to the network or the OS, always has the possibility of being destructive, because you can never guarantee what a system not under your control will do in response to your message), just accept the reminder that it's not functional/idempotent/memoizable/whatever else, and do it. This is going to sound like an odd analogy, but saying "I won't use Haskell because I want to do IO, but don't want to unsafely do IO", makes you sound like a person playing a fighting game who blames their loss on the game not being "fair." If you're playing to win[1], and there's an "unfair" tactic, you use it yourself. If "cheating" at Haskell lets you do a higher-quality job, faster, than either using a different language or "playing Haskell as it was meant to be played" (i.e. being a scrub) then why not? [1] http://www.sirlin.net/ptw http://www.sirlin.net/ptw
- Confusion 16y ago
  Except that it's not necessary, because at least 3 solutions that don't use unsafePerformIO were posted to that Reddit thread.

Lewisham 16y ago

To expand on this, and on the OP, one thing that you need after the force is momentum. I strongly feel that if Ruby was just Rails, it would have petered out by now (maybe people might have even gone back to Perl and CPAN). I think that GitHub may well be the driving force behind Ruby at this point. GitHub gems are pretty decent, but like the OP points out, Haskell packages aren't.

nex3 16y ago
GitHub no longer builds or serves gems.
- Lewisham 16y ago
  Well, what I mean is they're developed on GitHub, then released to RubyGems.

smcl 16y ago

Was C really obscure before Linus Torvalds released\popularised linux? I'm fairly young so I have no knowledge of this, but it feels wrong. edit: just noticed a discussion about this exists already. That'll teach me to read all the comments in future :)

jacquesm 16y ago

I think giving Linus Torvalds the credit for pushing C into the mainstream is a bit much. Long before Linus came along C was the programming language of choice for anything from games to operating systems and so on.