It seems weird to think that there exists any language currently which will wind up being the one-true-language. As an industry (and a research area) there sti

It seems weird to think that there exists any language currently which will wind up being the one-true-language. As an industry (and a research area) there still doesn't seem to be any real consensus around "what's best"; just a bunch of differing opinions and trade-offs. I don't think any amount of evidence (were it even to exist) would convince someone not amenable to strongly-enforced static types to see their value. The entire practice of software development seems oriented around feelings and past experience. I can appreciate that their are groups of people doing research to try and bring rigor and quantified data to the process, but if at the end of the day, a developer can spend a weekend putting together a node.js web app and have that take off and prove successful, you've pretty much lost any opportunity to convince them that they should stop using their tools and switch to some different tools. I don't actually think there's anything wrong with that either; good for them for being suspicious. I decided to investigate Haskell about 8 months ago when I had an opportunity to write a big system for my job. It fit well within my constraints and requirements, and the little I knew of it at the time seemed like it would be a good language to spend time getting to know. I liked that everything in the language seemed like it got there through reasoned debate and experimentation, and that it seemed like a language-feature sandbox that more mainstream languages were eventually pulling from (Perl advocates say the same thing about Perl, mainly that it already has all the features that other languages are now trying to figure out how to implement). I liked that they don't seem to punt on the hard problems (which over time become more and more of the problems left for languages to address), even if that means that doing complicated things in Haskell is complicated. I don't know how I'd feel about Haskell suddenly becoming super popular though. Even aside from the "God I hate that this band I've been into for a while is now suddenly popular" trendiness, I don't think the community would be able to handle sanely what an influx of massive amounts of new users would do to things. It's hard enough getting all the category theorists and abstract algebra professors to deal with the fact that Cabal takes lower and upper bounds on dependencies. If I could spend the entirety of my career using Haskell for everything, maybe that would be great. I haven't gotten good enough yet to have strong opinions about its failings, so I'm still very much in the honeymoon period. But that seems like a silly thing to shoot for, even if I feel the same way about Haskell in 10 years that I do now. And it seems silly to expect that everyone else would feel the same way.