I can show you the assembly language for a loop and a function call in a dozen instructions. What is the assembly language for a monad? our hypothetical Blub p

I can show you the assembly language for a loop and a function call in a dozen instructions. What is the assembly language for a monad? our hypothetical Blub programmer This is all patronizing rationalization to believe that people aren't picking someone else's favorite language because they "just aren't smart enough to get it". Programming is hard enough without constantly trying to make languages themselves a silver bullet. Fancy macros, fance meta programming, 'pure mathematics' etc. never equals productivity over the long term. Library writers can get away with it, but simplicity wins overall because people can focus on making programs and making tools surrounding the language. Lisp and Haskell were influential, but that doesn't make them good tools by modern standards. They had ideas that made it into other programming languages and that's enough. They did their jobs. Haskell has major programs with controlling order of execution because it pretends it can be abstracted away. "The Secret Weapon" behind the success of Viaweb Haskell users always talk about the same handful of programs that no one would have heard about if they weren't made in haskell. Meanwhile 90% of software that people actually use is basically made in C++, python and javascript. The languages aren't perfect, but when people sit down to program they can move past the language and actually write software.