Re: F# fsharp

On Jun 10, 2010, at 10:45 PM, Brandon Van Every wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 11:37 PM, Jon Frisby <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 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
> 
> nitpicks:
> - Google hired Guido
> - nobody takes Perl 6 seriously

They hired Guido AFTER Python had already become widely used.

And Perl falling flat on its face does not change the fact that for a good long time, Perl 5 was commercially significant (and still sees wide usage today).


> Haskell has been out in open source land just as long as the more
> successful things you mention, and almost nobody has wanted Haskell.

To be precise:
Perl - 1987
Haskell - 1990
Ruby, PHP - 1995

I'm fairly certain there isn't One True Timeline for wide adoption of a tool.  Wide adoption depends both on the ability to solve a problem 'better' than the existing solutions AND on the ability of possible consumers of the tool to discover that information.  This often happens in the form of a 'killer app' getting a lot of attention.

For example, it was the case for most of the history of PHP and Ruby that the latter would let you write cleaner code, more quickly, with less effort, in the specific domain of 'the web'.  Despite that, PHP got all the attention and energy poured into it.  Between the two, it was the tool used for the web, and Ruby was just some little curiosity in the corner that nobody paid attention to.

It wasn't until Rails came along that people 'noticed' that Ruby was actually quite well suited to 'the web'.  (To this day there isn't a "clear winner" in the PHP web framework world, and it seems the majority of web apps written in PHP are hand-rolled, with the consequent loss of time/energy to the needless reinvention of wheels.)

Ruby did not need to change to be better for 'the web', it just needed to overcome peoples tendency to be dismissive of the unfamiliar and to utterly lack any imagination/foresight/etc.


> The clear explanation is there were easy gains to be made in open
> source Unix clones, Unix admin tools, and web apps.  Pretty much all
> of the "O'Reilly languages" grew because of the web.  Haskell worried
> about academic stuff, and consequently nobody cared.

Or perhaps people who aren't using Haskell have made deep assumptions about how it must be grossly unsuited to anything but 'academia' and have thus chosen to ignore it.

You've made a bunch of statements hand-waving Haskell away with the slander of 'academia', but have not once pointed to a specific behavior/feature (or lack thereof) that makes it unsuitable for real world use -- other than the fact that it ISN'T being used widely.  While the lack of wide use creates problems versus other tools, that's not sufficient indictment of the tool to warrant ignoring it completely.

-JF

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