when you start considering effectful computation at a deep level, monads come up pretty quickly
You say that, but they only seem to come up when dealing with haskell.
You say that, but they only seem to come up when dealing with haskell.
This is similar to structured loops and function calls (not GOTO), which are in computations that we care about, regardless of the implementing programming languages. Some languages do not name and reason about them (e.g., Assembly, Turing Machines).
While it is possible to program without raising the level of discourse, this is discouraged (considered harmful), as it lacks safety, hurts productivity (developer velocity/experience), and scales worse.
> > when you start considering effectful computation at a deep level, monads come up pretty quickly
> You say that, but they only seem to come up when dealing with haskell.
"when you start considering structured computation at a deep level, loops and function calls come up pretty quickly"
"You say that, but structured loops only seem to come up when dealing with high level languages."
This situation, where a higher level programming language delivers more power (in this case, scales with better developer velocity/experience) but a lower level programmer resists, has been observed many times. Paul Graham calls this the Blub Paradox [1].
What's so great about Lisp? And if Lisp is so great, why doesn't everyone use it?...
I'll begin with a shockingly controversial statement: programming languages vary in power.
... But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub.
[1]: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html "Beating the Averages"
our hypothetical Blub programmer
This is all patronizing rationalization to believe that people aren't picking someone else's favorite language because they "just aren't smart enough to get it".
Programming is hard enough without constantly trying to make languages themselves a silver bullet. Fancy macros, fance meta programming, 'pure mathematics' etc. never equals productivity over the long term. Library writers can get away with it, but simplicity wins overall because people can focus on making programs and making tools surrounding the language.
Lisp and Haskell were influential, but that doesn't make them good tools by modern standards. They had ideas that made it into other programming languages and that's enough. They did their jobs. Haskell has major programs with controlling order of execution because it pretends it can be abstracted away.
"The Secret Weapon" behind the success of Viaweb
Haskell users always talk about the same handful of programs that no one would have heard about if they weren't made in haskell.
Meanwhile 90% of software that people actually use is basically made in C++, python and javascript. The languages aren't perfect, but when people sit down to program they can move past the language and actually write software.