[michaelochurch]

I think that it's self-reinforcing.

Let's have an honest conversation. Haskell is a great programming language. It might be the best. It is not going to get more than a 20% market share in the programming community. It could get 1 percent, which is about 5 times what it has now (measured in available jobs) and 25 times what it had 5 years ago. It could get 5 percent. It might even get 15 percent.

Much of our industry is based on trend-chasing. This 25-year-old language that happens to be really good, but whose strongest proponents even admit that it will never have a dominant (25+ percent) market share like Java or Javascript or PHP, is not a shoo-in for "next dominant paradigm".

Functional programming may be the next important paradigm and we're seeing the best programmers and the most important work gravitate toward it, but it's never going to be the go-to tool for the business-driven Scrum engineering that seems to dominate the mainstream of software.

[willtim]

What I would like to see happen is less use of general purpose programming languages; and more use of domain specific languages. DSLs give less opportunities for people to shoot themselves in the foot and more possibilities for heterogeneous hardware, parallel programming, static analysis etc. Of course, a small percentage of us will have to write these DSLs and Haskell IMHO is currently the best tool for this.