[qayxc]

I think the reaction by many people would still be same 30 years later today. Tooling and standardization sure helped with C++, but the authors pointed out the psychological and sociological barriers involved. While some of these barriers have eroded in the past decades (evolving imperative languages incorporated more and more functional aspects over time), but pure functional languages are still perceived as "too clever" by many.

I also wonder how the literate programming approach taken with the Haskell solution compares to the "test harness" used by the C++ implementation in terms of documentation. It has been shown that people read code differently from prose and tests suites are somewhat comparable to the "executable specification" that literate programming provides, with the former aligning more closely with reading the implementation.

It'd be interesting to conduct a similar study today with more contemporary contestants like Haskell, C++20, Rust, Python (it's about prototyping after all), Java, C#/F#, and Julia. It'd also be intriguing to learn whether the perception of the functional solutions changed over time.