You're starting with a fundamental assumption that there are two classes of languages, which you are calling pragmatic languages and research languages. I disag

You're starting with a fundamental assumption that there are two classes of languages, which you are calling pragmatic languages and research languages. I disagree. Researchers study languages of all sorts (there are plenty of research papers on Java), and practitioners use languages of all sorts (there are plenty of businesses using Haskell). Furthermore, many of the characteristics that make a language worth studying also make it worth using in practice. Haskell has been around for nearly 25 years, not 15, and the ML family has been around for nearly 40. Strong type systems are not a research curiosity, and have not been for decades. They have significant and well-understood benefits, in practice. I wish your hypothesis that the best ideas from research would be copied by other languages were true, but the history does not bear this out. A notable recent example is Swift: though it does make progress compared to its reference class, it still does not use any research more recent than roughly the 1970s. Clearly, the "pragmatic" languages are not keeping up. In what sense is it "pragmatic" to constrain yourself to decades-old technology? The Haskell language is not constrained by some God-given purpose to be a research language for all time. Haskellers aren't "deny[ing] the true purpose of the language", they're choosing to use a useful tool, because doing so is pragmatic.