I think people are too quick to judge languages.

If I tell you that Haskell has a fragmentation problem, I feel good about telling you that because I actually have experience with it.

However Haskell is still a language that I'd pick over Java, Go, JavaScript or any of the mainstream languages for that matter and I'd be willing to put my reputation on the line for that choice.

I also worked with C++. To see people compare Scala and Haskell with C++, kind of rubs me the wrong way.

And unfortunately such opinions stay on the Internet forever, are picked up by beginners and repeated verbatim.

So no, there's a huge difference between Scala, Haskell and C++. For one the former wouldn't lead to stupid and disastrous bugs like Heartbleed, whereas C++ can and routinely does. By comparison when well typed Scala or Haskell programs compile, the defect rate tends to be really low.

I'm seriously thinking about starting a course in how badly and easily you can fuck up in C/C++, for people that make unfair comparissons with them, making life hard for their managers :-)

Also just to get this out of the way... the problem in Scala are actually the Java refugees going gung-ho on OOP. And the FP people, because they tend to be more experienced, are the ones cleaning up the mess.

And I like that. You know why? Because Scala makes it possible to introduce FP gradually, without an organization wide commitment. In the company I'm working for, a language like Haskell would never fly, but Scala does.

Also in case you haven't noticed, FP is spreading.

- in Typescript/JS you have fantasy-land and fp-js

- in Kotlin you have Arrow

The difference is that you don't get the nice type system to support those abstractions well, so you also get the weird HKT and type class encodings to go with it. Although in fairness the Arrow guys are working on compiler plugins for better supporting type classes and the HKT encoding that they use.

So if you're conservative about adopting FP, language choice will not really protect you ;-)