> I'm saying the functional abstraction doesn't work or is clunky in a lot of cases and that Haskell's approach of making it the core of the language is misguid

> I'm saying the functional abstraction doesn't work or is clunky in a lot of cases and that Haskell's approach of making it the core of the language is misguided Functional programming certainly doesn't work literally everywhere, but to say Haskell's design is "misguided" is your opinion, and it's one that some of the biggest names in the industry reject. How much experience do you have designing programming languages? Or even just building non-trivial systems in Haskell? Judging by the evident ignorance masked with strong opinions I'd say around about the square root of diddly-nothing. > But throw in some form of IO or even random numbers and you have to leave the magical functional world. Wrong. Functional programming handles IO and randomness just fine. > And you know why SQL works so fine? Because there are a lot of people working hard in C/C++ doing kernel and low-level work so that the "magic" is not lost on the higher level abstractions Are you suggesting there aren't a lot of people working hard on GHC? Because if you are — and you seem to be — then again you would be wrong.