February 7, 2011
"Python surged hugely this last year — more than any other language. […] I’m not convinced. I suspect part of the new adoption comes from Perl programmers who are throwing in the towel."

From The Rise And Fall of Languages in 2010.

This guy is good! Count me in!

by jjm on 7:12pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZPorZy2ylXhI
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August 2, 2010
Why isn’t $LANG Popular in Industry?

With LANG=haskell, Why isn’t Haskell popular in Industry?

It’s interesting because I think that list of 9 points can apply to other languages too (such as Perl).

A language is unpopular because it’s different, and it makes it difficult to learn. Moreover a language can be popularly known to be difficult, or believed to have known problems, such as maintainability or code readability.

It’s very difficult to hire programmers that already know it, because it’s unpopular. Although you can teach it, it doesn’t make the language suitable for your projects, because you need good programmers already trained, and you can’t find them!

All together makes that language a risky option that gets discarded in favour of other ‘industry leading’ languages such as Java.

And don’t forget the customer: they’re used to some words, and although it’s not their business, they tend to be more happy if they know (or think they know) about the technology you’re using. So, it can be harder to sell an application made in Haskell.

At the end, sadly, the advantages of using $LANG aren’t that important.