Re: F# fsharp

On Jun 10, 2010, at 2:13 PM, Brandon Van Every wrote:

>> I do feel this is rather unfair, although I'm not totally sure who 'these
>> people' are? I have not found the FP community to be against wider adoption
>> of Haskell in industry, quite the reverse. In particular, I've found all the
>> GHC guys to be very keen to both promote and understand the problems faced
>> by people interested in adopting Haskell outside academia. This isn't
>> surprising - industry adoption of your research is perhaps the best
>> validation you could get.
> 
> People don't just listen to academics and then adopt their toys.  It
> takes money and corporate muscle, such as Microsoft is providing for
> F#.  It doesn't matter whether academics like the idea of industrial
> adoption in theory, as they're not doing the legwork to make it so.
> Microsoft Research hired a lot of language researchers, and they sat
> around for *years* in irrelevance, same as Haskell, until finally they
> got far enough that there was something worth productizing.  Then it
> got green lighted and now we have the result.  We don't have to sit
> around in academic theory land anymore, we can get on with real work.

Perl, Python, PHP, and Ruby all share the characteristic of being the product of a handful of individuals that became sufficiently widely used through purely 'organic' growth that they are now taken seriously at many large companies and have developed significant ecosystems around them including considerable commercial tools.  (And before you mention IronPython -- note that Python has achieved most/all of its adoption long before IronPython was a twinkle in anyone's eye.)

Linux, *BSD, Apache, Samba, and a number of other technologies that aren't programming languages share similar histories.

Corporate muscle will get you in the front door when nobody's heard of you, but it isn't the only way in and it isn't a sure-fire way in.  History is littered with the corpses of failed technologies that had "money and corporate muscle" behind them.  (May God have mercy on Plan 9's soul...)

-JF
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