[tel]

I feel it's similar to any competitive environment: differentiation requires making strong tradeoffs. Haskell's choice of tradeoffs---while initially very ivory tower---have led to to become a strongly differentiated language. You not only learn how HM typing and full commitment FP feel, but also how to structure code purely, compose effects, and abuse laziness.

So for the very same reasons you give---Haskell has made fewer tradeoffs for "practical" programming---Haskell has become something valuable and interesting. On those tides the community has grown.

[jamii]

Another big obstacle was that the INRIA license effectively prevents forking the language (you can only distribute modified compilers as original source + patch, not as eg a github repo) so for a long time there was a bottleneck on the language evolution. Lots of useful extensions (eg delimited continuations, staging) wilted and died because of that.

The rise of OcamlPro and Ocaml Labs does give me hope for the future of the language. There is already renewed momentum behind fixing packaging and handling multicore.

Now if someone would just figure out ad-hoc polymorphism (just pick one of the dozens of propasals) and maybe even document camlp4/5....