That's not what the author of the article seems to think, though. He admits that "Haskell is never really going to be a mainstream programming language," but ev

That's not what the author of the article seems to think, though. He admits that "Haskell is never really going to be a mainstream programming language," but even non-mainstream languages, like, say, Erlang or Clojure are very much concerned with the why, and aren't aimed at research. A research language and a non-mainstream language are two very different things.