I can't help but notice that the vast majority of commenters are missing the fundamental reason for all this handwringing. The reason isn't language schism (th

I can't help but notice that the vast majority of commenters are missing the fundamental reason for all this handwringing. The reason isn't language schism (that too, but I'd attach a much smaller weight to it) so much as the schism between corporatism & academia. Corporate America wants languages that are dumb, easy for corporate drones to assimilate, hard to mess up with, verbose ( verbosity is misinterpreted as documentation in the enterprise) and Java fits the bill from the get-go. Now, that doesn't mean you can't do non-dumb things in Java - at Sun Microsystems, we worked on all sorts of very cool R&D-type shit like JavaOS(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaOS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaOS), Hotjava ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotJava http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotJava), JavaSpaces (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaSpaces#JavaSpaces http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaSpaces#JavaSpaces ), JavaCC( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaCC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaCC ), Jini (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jini http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jini ), ...a very long list of R&D stuff. Sun Research was fucking elite, & staff engineers were considered outright geniuses. None of that cool R&D shit got any traction. So what got traction ? Whatever yucky shit corporate America wanted - JavaBeans( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Beans http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Beans ), EJB (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EJB http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EJB ), Swing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_(Java) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_(Java) ), various sorts of form-builders, table widgets, reporting shit, IDEs, classfile obfuscators,... So Java became that. Rather than go down the R&D route, the pipeline became more corporate America oriented. Haskell has always had very deep roots in academia - the focus on enabling the corporate American drone with Haskell is minimal, close to zero. So what do you expect ? The focus will be on debating types & building theorem provers, not on "how to show big bank's fourth quarter report in 3 colors with 7 columns and subtotals in single widget while data-binding seamlessly occurs in middle tier using enterprise beans built from beanfactoryfactory" - this sort of shit that is commonplace in the Java EE world I inhabited post Sun, would be considered positively gauche in Haskell.