(off-topic/a bit of personal history) I was in college around those years, and working on the side as a consultant [dotcom boom=companies were crazy for anyone

(off-topic/a bit of personal history) I was in college around those years, and working on the side as a consultant [dotcom boom=companies were crazy for anyone with some experience]. I had a infatuation with programming languages and got proficient enough in 14 of them to write non-trivial code: a toy language (logic language, prolog/datalog) and problems from my consulting gigs, IIRC network flow analysis from logs, and relational database sync with data compression (a client had sales agents[1] on dial-up; I wrote their app in Delphi, but was struggling to sync without errors and fast enough). (start here to not get bored) Haskell wasn't definitely ready for enterprise. It felt very researchy. I do remember other functional languages with HM-style types that felt more polished and ready: e.g. I did learn Ocaml, or Concurrent Clean. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_(programming_language) Jane Street adopted Ocaml in the mid 2000s. https://blog.janestreet.com/what-the-interns-have-wrought-2023/ https://blog.janestreet.com/what-the-interns-have-wrought-20... "Yaron Minsky joined Jane Street back in 2002, and claims the dubious honor of having convinced the firm to start using OCaml." https://www.janestreet.com/tech-talks/jane-and-compiler/ https://www.janestreet.com/tech-talks/jane-and-compiler/ "that’s when we made a real kind of fateful step into integrating OCaml into our permanent infrastructure. And that was like in 2005, we started doing this 2006, we had about 10 people who were programming in OCaml" (more off-topic) [1] I really liked Ocaml... but, sadly, I discovered it only after I finished that sales agents system and the final version was in Delphi for the main app and Dolphin Smalltalk for the sync part (I needed metaprogramming to pull it off).