> All of that means that unless your language has some clear and direct effect on the bottom line — which, these days, usually means it has good performance and

> All of that means that unless your language has some clear and direct effect on the bottom line — which, these days, usually means it has good performance and/or observability, a good ecosystem, or a monopoly of sorts on some distribution platform -- there is no "message" that can make it popular, other than "it's easy and it's fun." While perhaps not a sufficient requirement for success, this can create a supply of qualified developers that at least won't put your language at a disadvantage. I think this approaches the heart of the problem. Whatever the advantages of haskell may be, the disadvantages run extremely deep. Haskell is notoriously difficult to debug and optimize (both memory and cpu usage). It is interesting and influential, but trying to abstract away the order of operations as a core of the language just didn't pan out. All of that is before issues of IDEs, libraries, compilation times etc. It has been around for 30 years, at some point it needs to be called a worthwhile experiment so people can move on from clenching their fists that no one else is as clever as they are. The more I think about it, my ideal language would be the exact opposite. Something extremely clear and straight forward with minimal complexity and maximum infrastructure.