[Haskell-cafe] How many "Haskell Engineer I/II/III"s are there?

[Andrew Coppin]

Jason Dusek wrote:
>   Although I'm fond of Haskell, in practice I am not a
>   Haskell programmer -- I'm paid for Ruby and Bourne shell
>   programming.
>
>   Many of the jobs posted on this list end up being jobs
>   for people who appreciate Haskell but will work in C# or
>   O'Caml or some-such.
>
>   I wonder how many people actually write Haskell,
>   principally or exclusively, at work?
>   

I usually estimate the answer to this question by looking up how many 
employees WellTyped.com and Galois.com have between them, under the 
simplifying assumption that the number of other people using Haskell is 
probably so utterly insignificant that it doesn't matter.

I'd love to see Haskell become popular, but it doesn't seem to be in any 
rush to happen just yet. (Then again, I gather 10 years ago things were 
far, far worse than they are today...)

Some people (especially C programmers) have tried to tell me that 
Haskell is too slow. Others have claimed it's too incomprehensible. 
"People inherantly thing sequentially, not set-theoretically" they say. 
(Last time I checked, nobody's complaining about SQL being 
unintuitive...) "People don't think recursively" is another 
commonly-sited objection. Still others point out that Haskell is a 
*pure* functional language, and all the most popular languages are 
hybrids. Eiffel is a pure-OO language, but the hybrids like Java and C++ 
far vastly more popular. I myself might point out the comparative 
immaturity of things on Windows (the single biggest target platform on 
the market), and the rough edges on tools like Darcs, Haddock and Cabal. 
If enough people become interested, all these things could (and 
hopefully would) be fixed. It's a question of whether we reach the 
necessary critical mass or not...