I can’t say for Haskell, but I can say for Lisp, which similarly gets these “look how great” articles but also similarly doesn’t see a huge up-tick in usage. W

I can’t say for Haskell, but I can say for Lisp, which similarly gets these “look how great” articles but also similarly doesn’t see a huge up-tick in usage. Whether you’re a student fresh out of school, or you’ve been unemployed for 10 years as a sysadmin, or you’re an expert programmer already, Common Lisp is accessible to you. Those examples are real; they’re backgrounds of folks I either used to or currently work with. Being paid helps immensely. So it’s not that the language is unlearnable, unreadable, or out-of-reach. (The pot-shots that random commenters in forums like these take on the language are usually shallow or even outright wrong.) In some cases, it’s even demonstrated to be asymptotically more productive. So what’s the deal? I personally think it’s just that productivity isn’t in and of itself incentivizing enough. You know Python and C++, you’re relatively proficient at them, you know how to get the job done with them, why learn something new? Haskell/Lisp won’t get you a job (necessarily), it won’t allow you to do something with a computer that you fundamentally couldn’t do before, and it’ll suck up a lot of your time to figure out what’s going on with them. Moreover, there’s no big organization behind it (like Mozilla or Facebook or Microsoft or ...) so where’s the credibility? A bunch of researchers at some university? A bunch of open-source hackers? I think one has to be personally invested in becoming a broadly more knowledgeable and more skilled programmer, just for the sake of it, and (IME) most people aren’t like that. I think one has to also have a penchant for finding simpler or more fundamental ways of solving problems, and that has to turn into an exploratory drive. Even if one is like that, learning Haskell is one of a hundred possible paths to improve oneself. My comment shouldn’t be misconstrued as supporting a mindset of it being OK to just know a couple languages well. I think the hallmark of an excellent programmer is precisely this broad knowledge of not just tools, but ways of thinking, in order to solve the gnarly problems that come up in software.