[retrac]

Haskell would conquer the world if it had a C-like DSL with C-like semantics. Think do notation with a state monad, on steroids. Thing is, there's already a dozen homespun libraries of various kinds doing just that. As an extreme example (mostly just to prove the point): http://kormacode.blogspot.com/2011/11/c-style-haskell_10.htm...

Which leads me to perhaps the real thing functional languages need. A standard way of doing things. Standard patterns for standard problems, familiar and normal, which the average programmer can recognize. This is related to the Lisp curse:

> Lisp is so powerful that problems which are technical issues in other programming languages are social issues in Lisp.

http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html Most functional languages suffer from this to some degree.