[AnimalMuppet]

> The market is irrational.

To some degree. But programmers are not, in general, easily herded, even by other programmers.

> There is no reason to believe popularity has any significant correlation to the effectiveness of a tool.

Programmers are not stupid. They are not totally ineffective at pushing management to use sane tools. One or both of those would have to be true for your statement to be true.

Well, you may say, it's a slow process. But Haskell has been out there for more than 30 years. F# is 14 years old, and supported by Microsoft. These languages have had plenty of time for programmers to notice that they were actually more effective in the real world.