[bdamm]

Alas, I live an a world where efficiency does actually matter, and elegance to me includes efficiency. I live in a world of embedded software, portability, and reliability. In this regard, almost every single functional language is an utter failure, because they require runtimes and big fat common libraries. Even golang is borderline. Haskell has little chance.

Generally I think this does answer the question about why functional languages don't dominate more than they do - although you could make an argument that JavaScript is a functional language, and it certainly is enjoying a lot of dominance these days. JS environments aren't known for being particularly efficient, though. To me, efficient use of resources is elegant, and a language needs to be able to do that.

[linguae]

You brought up something interesting. I believe academic computer science originated from at least three cultures: pure mathematics (Church, Turing, Kleene, Dijkstra), electrical engineering, and psychology (Licklieder). I say “at least” since there may be other cultures I’ve overlooked. These three cultures have different views on programming: the EE-based culture emphasizes taking full advantage of the underlying hardware, the math-based culture emphasizes proof, and the psychology-based culture emphasizes human factors.

The challenge is reconciling these three views of programming: the holy grail is a programming language that is ergonomic and expressive, yet is also amenable to mathematical reasoning and can be implemented efficiently. I wonder if there is a programming language theory version of the CAP theory in distributed systems, where one compares performance, ease of mathematical reasoning about code, and human factors?

[mrkeen]

Your environment is probably not more constrained than this: https://github.com/Copilot-Language/copilot

[bdamm]

That is really quite cool, and unlike any functional language I've seen.