I get the desire, but you'll never be able to popularize Haskell because the only people who want to use it are math majors, and most web devs are not math majors.
If you want to popularize Haskell you'll need to rework the syntax at the very least.
If you want to popularize Haskell you'll need to rework the syntax at the very least.
Edit: This is FUD and I kind of feel offended by it, though I'm not sure that is rational
I'm not a math major. I am a web dev. I want to use Haskell (and am using in a smaller capacity) because it means I have to be up late fixing things less. It means that I can worry about my sites getting hacked less because of the strong static typing guarantees which protect me against csrf.
On top of all that type annotations are great for documenting things. On top of that, composing functions and monads can allow you to do things much safer and much more quickly.
There are many teaching resources which show how some of Haskell's perceived cons can be pros such as these:
http://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/Haskell-the-Hard-Way...
http://book.realworldhaskell.org/
http://adit.io/posts/2013-04-17-functors,_applicatives,_and_... (with web dev applicable example) http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_H...
Honestly from my experiences in #haskell on freenode, /r/haskell, and Haskell related content on the web it seems like many more people are using it with the intent to make "real world software".
I haven't gotten the ivory tower vibe from anyone in the Haskell community yet. Quite the opposite actually, everyone seems very pragmatic.
I.e., if I want a module in my app to have two different types containing an element 'customerID' that I'd like to refer by name in that context, then it's a bit painful - and it is a really common need if I need to quickly make a mostly-CRUD webapp, for which otherwise Haskell/Yesod would be as practical as Ruby/Rails.
http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1rpte3/explanation_...
The other thing is I believe frameworks like Yesod use property based testing which IME catches a lot more than unit tests by themselves.
I feel like my point is unclear here, perhaps someone more experienced with Haskell and/or Yesod can articulate it better than I can.
Most web devs are frightened by functional programming idioms and will run away screaming when exposed to monads.
But the biggest problem imho is the type system that while great, makes things like making simple structs / named tupples or whatever you want to call them annoying and the lack of any "nice" way to just do OOP in it - and no, saying OOP is a bad idea and pretending it doesn't exist doesn't work.
Scala is a good Haskell for web dev. But it's too complex and has no chance of broad adoption against Node/Javascript, Ruby, Python and even PHP frameworks because for 90% of devs it simply doesn't bring anything good enough to make it worth putting up with the complexities stemming from the unholy OOP+FP mix.
Scala's type signatures are even harder than Haskell's (or at least, mixing FP with OOP makes them harder for me) but you don't get the same guarantees about side-effects and the type inference doesn't work as well. And implicits scare me.
Scala's OOP may be good or bad, but it certainly adds an additional layer of complexity, and one you can't ignore when reading or using someone else's code.