Comments on: Dead Languages: 12 That Never Took Off

By: Sloot

Sloot — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 11:49:43 +0000

People outside Ottawa would be shocked at the amount of PowerBuilder code that is run and written in the Canadian government. I think it’s the entire reason that Sybase hasn’t killed it yet.

By: Joey deVilla

Joey deVilla — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 15:35:11 +0000

Another factor that may help Erlang adoption: the book. As with Dive Into Python, there's nothing like a well-written book to help give a language a boost. If Programming Erlang is at least on par with other "Pragmatic Programmers" titles, it should help.

By: Jim McCoy

Jim McCoy — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 05:37:39 +0000

Leaving aside my original snarky answer, I think that what will end up dooming Haskell is that it is just too hard for most coders to use effectively, or at least to do something that they can’t do 80-90% as well in another language. This is what I think distinguishes Haskell from Erlang (another reddit fave) — Erlang is different that just about anything you have ever used before but the learning curve is not as steep as Haskell and the niche it occupies (concurrency) is served incredibly poorly by every other language out there and it becoming a hot topic.

By: Alex Payne

Alex Payne — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 00:01:40 +0000

I’ve nothing against Haskell, but the difference between Ruby and Haskell is that Ruby found its killer app/mojo/community in a comparatively short period of time.

Haskell has been around in various forms since 1990 and it still hasn’t taken off. That’s 17 years of not taking off.

Ruby, on the other hand, emerged in 1995. If you count the growing buzz around Rails in 2005 as Ruby’s taking-off point, that’s ten years from concept to community.

It doesn’t take long for good ideas to catch on.

By: Joey deVilla

Joey deVilla — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 17:54:17 +0000

Well, there's always a chance that the Haskell equivalent of David Heinemeier Hansson is cobbling together a Haskell-based killer app between supermodel shoots! And for those readers who don't get the reference to Lisp, what Jim (who I know from the P2P boom in 2000/2001) did is the programmer equivalent of standing near a tree in a lightning storm, waving a golf club and screaming "Storms suck!" as loudly as possible.

By: Jim McCoy

Jim McCoy — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 17:09:56 +0000

What moved Ruby off of this was was a killer app (Rails) and so far Haskell lacks that. Right now Haskell is on track to become the Lisp of the 21st century: interesting, mind-warping, and the wrong tool to choose for delivering a real application or service. I predict a long future for Haskell in academia and not much future outside of it. [Now to go hide from the oncoming mob of Lisp weenies...]