It's cooled down by now, but I recall far more aggressive advocacy for Python even just a few years ago. Everyone was pushing it as the best language ever and a

It's cooled down by now, but I recall far more aggressive advocacy for Python even just a few years ago. Everyone was pushing it as the best language ever and a healthy breath of fresh air from whatever else they happen to be using. After all, all those other languages are not Pythonic! Of course, look where that got them. PHP users do not talk about other languages as being inherently dangerous because they simply do not have a leg to stand on. They're perfectly happy talking about how all other languages are impossible to set up and completely impractical for beginner web programmers though--just look at any recent PHP thread on HN. They essentially push PHP as a language for "Joe the plumber", which I personally find rather more condescending. And, before my time, OOP was getting pushed far harder than functional programming is now. I've read plenty of old articles and whole books about how OOP (in its C++ or Java guide) is essentially the second coming, here to liberate you from your horrible procedural C/Perl ways. Hell, design patters practically became a religion with the gang of four as its prophet. Good times. But hey, with all that crazy proselytization, there's no way that cult or Java would ever catch on, happily. Don't even get me started about Go, the language whose designers dismiss practically every recent PL advancement as academic nonsense and have reinvented a bunch of wheels. And yet it's "just in a league of its own for concurrency", to quote a recent HN post. But yes, Haskell is unique in this regard.