[thirsteh]

Having read numerous rants by Harper against Haskell, it really just seems like he's upset Haskell turned out to be the "popular" language.

He is an accomplished computer scientist and a major contributor to Standard ML (i.e. understandably biased), but his Haskell rants read like (type-safe) schoolyard banter.

[tel]

Perhaps there are some sour grapes, but I think more than that he's just hoping for more. Harper clearly has an executes on a grand vision for what PLs should be—he regularly states that there is only one PL and we're just working to slowly uncover it. Haskell fits it in some ways, and now those ways aren't worth talking about any further, and misses it in others. Harper, I believe, writes to galvanize people to move toward his grand vision of unified PL.

ML is better than Haskell in many ways. This should drive Haskell to improve as much as it drives people to check out ML. And it has!

[thirsteh]

That makes sense. I wish he'd stop writing obviously linkbait titles like "Haskell is Exceptionally Unsafe" when what he means is that there are some really obscure safety implications for typeable exceptions. I completely agree with bjterry that it has probably caused more people to not look at Haskell to begin with, than people to look at ML.

[tel]

I think, honestly, Harper has recently discovered his platform is larger than he once expected. There was certainly a time that incendiary, link-Barry titles were useful for, say, getting Haskell's exception system to be more safe (which he absolutely played a part in).

As the audience of his posts widens though it's clear that the impact of those posts is changing.

[peterfirefly]

Usually Andreas Rossberger has written a good rebuttal in the comments.