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I was getting my Master's in 2003 and Haskell was very hot amongst all the professors and students who were into functional programming. I learned it because o

I was getting my Master's in 2003 and Haskell was very hot amongst all the professors and students who were into functional programming. I learned it because of group projects where we could pick the implementation language and that's what our group wanted. At that time, Simon Peyton Jones was employed by Microsoft and, at least as I perceived it, was allowed to work on ghc full time because of the goodwill it generated amongst programmers for Microsoft to be the patron of Haskell.

p_l 7y ago
Haskell was strongly localized, and with heavy university bias. There were users outside, but not many, and I think it was around 2003-2005 that it became more common to use (also I suspect GHC to be significant in causing that). Also, Microsoft is quite open in its support for more heterogenous programming than typical Unix environment, with significant use of "niche" programming languages in various places (including things as atypical as putting custom Prolog implementation into Windows network configuration tools, just to run a prolog program that handled said configuration)
6thaccount2 7y ago
That might be a niche within a niche. With the advent of Learn You a Haskell, Real World Haskell, Haskell Book...etc, I really feel it is a lot more popular now, but I don't have your experience to draw upon so maybe it is just cognitive dissonance on my part. I doubt Paul Graham was into the theoretical programming scene in that era. He might have been aware of it, but I doubt it was as production worthy as Common Lisp and thus probably not worthy of his time.