[rramadass]

Under "Lessons Learned" section;

Haskell appeared to do quite well in the NSWC experiment; even better than we had anticipated! The reaction from the other participants, however, in particular those not familiar with the advantages of functional programming, was somewhat surprising, and is worth some discussion. There were two kinds of responses:

In conducting the independent design review at Intermetrics, there was a significance sense of disbelief. We quote from [CHJ93]: "It is significant that Mr. Domanski, Mr. Banowetz and Dr. Brosgol were all surprised and suspicious when we told them that Haskell prototype P1 (see appendix B) is a complete tested executable program. We provided them with a copy of P1 without explaining that it was a program, and based on preconceptions from their past experience, they had studied P1 under the assumption that it was a mixture of requirements specification and top level design. They were convinced it was incomplete because it did not address issues such as data structure design and execution order."

The other kind of response had more to do with the "cleverness" of the solution: it is safe to say that some observers have simply discounted the results because in their minds the use of higher-order functions to capture regions was just a trick that would probably not be useful in other contexts. One observer described the solution as "cute but not extensible" (para-phrasing); this comment slipped its way into an initial draft of the final report, which described the Haskell prototype as being "too cute for its own good" (the phrase was later removed after objection by the first author of this paper).

We mention these responses because they must be anticipated in the future. If functional languages are to become more widely used, various sociological and psychological barriers must be overcome. As a community we should be aware of these barriers and realize that they will not disappear overnight.