Lambda the Ultimate

[this is perhaps mostly a social/marketing thought, please let me know if it is too far afield from LtU policies. I'm not trying to start a flame war, i'm only trying to study history and extract some lessons for it which might be useful to other language advocates.]

(I care about "success" of a language in the sense that a larger community might bring improvements to that language's ecosystem. Even just having the core system exercised by more people in more different ways is a benefit, for shaking out bugs.)

I think Java jumped the shark a long time ago. But people are bought into it enough that it keeps on chugging, even though it has clearly lost its "simple" origins. I think a similar thing happened with C to C++ because there were folks who were into the (relative) simplicity of C, and then moved along into C++ (just like people moved along into Java 1.4, .5, ... with all the complexity and incompatibilities introduced therein).

So I think one way (of many possibilities) to have a language "succeed" is to do a hard sell on the fact that it is simple vs. the other main-stream languages people use, and that simple is obviously better. Once you have people on board, then you can (and will be forced to by those same people, most likely) change it to become a more convoluted mess with not too many people jumping ship as a result; they're too bought in.

Is this good? I certainly think Java was useful in many ways, but I also certainly have a huge distain for how it has changed and become kind of insane - it seems to be heading towards the half-baked buggy implementation of CL event horizon.

So I'd argue that a refined approach would be to have your langauge:

1. somehow designed to be revisable. Claims that you won't break compatibility either need to be backed up with real structure to support that, or you need to just not make the claim. Java kinda falls short there, methinks.
2. "simple" in a really powerful PLT sense, as well as a "can i teach it to others" sense. Oddly, the folks who make Java knew full-well of real simplicity-with-power, but avoided it, presumably as another layer of pragmatism (with the obvious resulting success).

So perhaps the real question I have in mind is: how to make something simple in the FP sense rather than in the imperative sense, and yet have it be be successful? (I believe Sun spent a lot on marketing Java, as an aside.)

Until yesterday, I wasn't aware of any web stores implemented in Haskell. Most users of languages like Haskell and ML tend to be focused on other kinds of applications. This sometimes leads to discussions about the "real-world suitability" of these languages, which we've occasionally seen here on LtU.

The next time the subject comes up, it will be possible to point to a real, complete web store written in Haskell, which was announced on Haskell-Cafe back in April. The store is Braintree Hemp, and the code behind it was written by Adam Peacock. It's an impressive program, written in a little over 4200 lines of Haskell, sporting the following features: