Erik Meijer. Confessions of a used programming language salesman. In Richard P. Gabriel, David F. Bacon, Cristina Videira Lopes, Guy L. Steele Jr., editors, Proceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, OOPSLA 2007, October 21-25, 2007, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. pages 677-694, ACM, 2007. [doi]
For many years I had been fruitlessly trying to sell functional programming and Haskell to solve real world problems such as scripting and data-intensive three-tier distributed web applications. The lack of widespread adoption of Haskell is a real pity. Functional programming concepts are key to curing many of the headaches that plague the majority of programmers, who today are forced to use imperative languages. If the mountain won’t come to Mohammed, Mohammed must go to the mountain, and so I left academia to join industry. Instead of trying to convince imperative programmers to forget everything they already know and learn something completely new, I decided to infuse existing imperative object-oriented programming languages with functional programming features. As a result, functional programming has finally reached the masses, except that it is called Visual Basic 9 instead of Haskell 98.