best of luck to him at any rate. haskell and ghc are a cool language and compiler combo, one i have enjoyed for recreational programming time and time again.
The apparent cluelessness level of this statement is so high, I am unable to decide if this is just ignorance or very sophisticated trolling.
If the compiler dev working in a university or a research lab while developing the compiler is "terrifying", you should avoid C, C++, and Python, not to mention smalltalk, Pascal, Prolog, Common Lisp, Scheme, SML and OCaml ....
There is always PHP. Turing Completeness FTW.
Why? Ignoring the ignorance does no good. Trend you've mentioned is nothing new, sadly, but if you are on the weaker side (the one that intellectuals always tend to find themselves on), the way to win is not to try to down vote clueless guys into the light-grey invisibility, imo, but to try to explain to them what's wrong with their view of the world.
Function invocation overhead, you say? Why would I want that?
How about Garbage Collection? It'll never work.
It's their responsibility to create foundational research, and it's ours to filter through it and prove the good bits with fire.
'Practical' is a red-herring, I think. We have no way to predict the future, but we all care about progress.
Yes, very much. He's one of the leading voices in the parallel Haskell world and a very accomplished programmer:
* http://hackage.haskell.org/package/stm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_Java_(programming_langu...
Martin's work was related to generics, which got introduced in 1.5.