The main problem is the difficulty to hire Haskell programmers. Recruiting is crucial to a startup's success.
Then there's the entire ecosystem surrounding Haskell, which is still old and antiquated (looking at you Cabal) and moving very slowly (interfacing to NoSQL or AWS, etc...).
Finally, the very high bar to just learn how to correctly program in Haskell puts it out of reach of 99% of the developer community.
That does not match my experience. I posted a Haskell position, promising to pay substantially below market rate with no hope of equity, and had a dozen or so applicants that seemed worthwhile (and a handful that really stood out, one of which turned into the hire).
"Then there's the entire ecosystem surrounding Haskell, which is still old and antiquated (looking at you Cabal)"
IME, pip is worse and Python seems a go-to choice for startups.
"Finally, the very high bar to just learn how to correctly program in Haskell puts it out of reach of 99% of the developer community."
Something like 99.9999% of the developer community isn't going to be working at your startup regardless.
"We were pleased to get a total of 42 applications, of which 19 merited serious consideration, and we eventually settled on a shortlist of 7 to interview. " [0]
Then there's the entire ecosystem surrounding Haskell, which is still old and antiquated (looking at you Cabal) and moving very slowly (interfacing to NoSQL or AWS, etc...).
> looking at you cabal
See this link for a solution: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9766943
> interfacing to NoSQL
I recently used the Haskell riak[3] binding in my day job for an application. The mongoDB[4] package was uploaded "Tue Jan 19 06:04:06 UTC 2010"[5]
> AWS
There has been an AWS binding since 2011[1][2].
> etc
cassandra[6][7][8]
couchdb[9]
> Finally, the very high bar to just learn how to correctly program in Haskell puts it out of reach of 99% of the developer community.
A 10 year old can do it[9], so I'm sure more than 5% of the developer community can as well!
I wouldn't say I'm a spectacular programmer and I have both learned Haskell and used it in the real world easily enough. I will admit in the past there was a learning issue, but actions to make Haskell easier to learn have (and continue) to happen.[11][12][13][14]
I'm looking forward to any rebuttals you may have to these! :)
0: http://www.well-typed.com/blog/2010/08/on-hiring-haskell-peo...
1: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/aws-0.0.1
2: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/aws
3: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/riak
4: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/mongoDB
5: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/mongoDB-0.1
6: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/cassandra-thrift
7: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/hscassandra
8: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/cassy
9: http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/search?terms=couchdb
10: https://superginbaby.wordpress.com/2015/04/08/teaching-haske...
11: https://github.com/bitemyapp/learnhaskell
13: http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Haskell-A-Project-Based-Appr...