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In a recent interview about Scala and Clojure, Martin Odersky of Scala gave some interesting answers including the following: Q: Rich Hickey is as well-read in the academic papers as anyone, but it’s Scala that has gained the perception as an “academic language”. Why do you think that has happened? A: I think it’s mostly people who want to put Scala down making that comment. They take my EPFL affiliation and the papers we publish as an excuse to attach that label to the language. What’s funny is that often senior industrial Scala programmers get also accused as being academic. All this is rather ironical because Scala is foremost an industrial language with many well known companies using it. By contrast it’s much less taught at universities than Haskell or Lisp, let alone Java! This raises the obvious question: in what sense is Scala "foremost an industrial language"? As we understand it, Scala is developed by an academic team led by professor Odersky at an academic insti...

Bugspy asked an interesting question on Stack Overflow recently: It is a wonderful, very fast, mature and complete language. It exists for a very long time and has a big set of libraries. Yet, it appears not to be widely used. Why ? I suspect it is because it is pretty rough and unforgiving for beginners, and maybe because its lazy execution makes it even harder Jeff Atwood, cofounder of Stack Overflow, has since closed the question for being subjective and argumentative. Sadly, Marc Gravell chose to edit my answer and delete half of my comments so the discussion no longer makes sense. However, my response will be of interest to anyone considering gambling their own money on Haskell so I shall repeat it here. The first point of interest is Norman Ramsey's meta-answer which was written from his point of view as an academic. Norman explains why he believes that major institutes have already made "great use" of Haskell: "Don't tell that to Credit Suisse or Standa...

A dutch startup called Tupil just announced that their first commercial application written in Haskell has gone live. Tupil describe themselves as: Tupil is Chris Eidhof and Eelco Lempsink . We code for a living, using functional programming languages like Haskell. Technology is our passion and we just love building great software tools. After working for years as web developers at very nice companies, we decided to go solo, together. Credible success stories of bleeding-edge functional languages like Haskell being used in industry are always great to see. Keep up the good work!