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Comment by stewbrew | Hacker News Reader

It took ages for Haskell to become "popular". My personal impression is that OCaml was more popular in the past and lost ground in recent years. OCaml's story demonstrates though how difficult it is to turn an academic research language into a widely accepted tool that is (financially) supported by the industry.

Clean had a performant compiler when Haskell was mostly interpreted and slow. Why didn't it take off? Maybe it wasn't the main goal of its developers once the publications were done.

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Languages don't win. Package management and distribution wins. Access and energy required for a viable solution.

Excellent point. Haskell got Cabal in 2005, and even if it to this day continues to be rather awkward to use, it is something. Clean never developed anything for this.

I believe a large part of Rust's popularity is due to its superb library infrastructure via Cargo and crates.io. Furthermore, I believe a large part of its contemporary competition (say, go, swift and crystal) tripping on its own feet is the lack (or weaknesses) of such a thing.

C won befoee package managers and Linux distributions existed.

Because it was the language of UNIX distributions (not called that, but it's the same concept).

They went hand in hand. I know lots of people that installed Linux in the 90s so they could use GCC.

If any of its competitors had had package managers as good as some of the modern ones, C would have lost.

well, unix was written in it, making it a natural choice if you're writing unix programs, or if you are writing programs on a unix.

And symbiotically, C was written to write unix.

edit: to note that by 'written' i mean designed and initially implemented.

> Why didn't it take off?

afaict there was a moment when most of the "pure" "lazy by default" functional language projects coalesced into Haskell to build working mass -- except the developers of Clean continued to see value in strictness analysis and uniqueness typing but that limited the numbers developing libraries and tools.

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