I think Simon Peyton Jones says it best about Haskell : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSmkqocn0oQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSmkqocn0oQ He says Haskell

I think Simon Peyton Jones says it best about Haskell : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSmkqocn0oQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSmkqocn0oQ He says Haskell is useless. Without even debating that (it can certainly be useful for certain classes of programming problems), you can see his point : The goal of Haskell was to start from an ideal view (pure functional programming without side effects) and try and see how to make that eventually practical for everyday programming, without sacrificing the pure core of the language. You have languages, like F# (or even C# !) that takes lessons from Haskell, with at the same time being practical for pretty much every programming task (their platform , .Net, makes them useless for a lot of use cases, but that is another problem) And on the other side (in my opinion), you have languages like Go, being pretty dismissive about pretty much everything learned from languages like Haskell. I respect the point of view of Go's creator, i just disagree with it, and don't see any project i could do in Go that i wouldn't prefer doing in Scala/OCaml/C#. But more power to people who want to do great things in Go ! Go fills a niche (AOT compiled without a VM) that only OCaml fills in the list of languages i have listed, and OCaml is probably much more complicated to learn, even if it is way simpler than Haskell, so even if i don't agree with the design choices, i can see why Go could gain traction (apart from the fact that it is Google powered)