My theory is that the FP folks would have seen more success had they figured out ways to bring their features to mainstream languages, rather than asking people to adopt wholesale their weird languages (from an average programmer's point of view). For example, why can't I annotate functions as lazy? Swift takes one step in that direction, with lazy var, but why not a lazy func or lazy class? Even the lazy var can't be used for local variables.
People are generally more willing to accept incremental changes than an entirely new way of doing things. For good reasons: they're skeptical, availability of talent, tools, libraries, IDEs, help if they run into trouble...
An analogy is the spread of yoga in the west the past decade or two, because it was easy to do so without changing your lifestyle. If Westerners were asked to fly to the Himalayas for a month to learn yoga, how many would have learnt yoga?
> My theory is that the FP folks would have seen more success had they figured out ways to bring their features to mainstream languages, rather than asking people to adopt wholesale their weird languages (from an average programmer's point of view).
I'd argue this has been happening for years and years now. If you want a pithy saying, you could say that over time languages become closer and closer to Haskell.
Option types, pattern matching, pure functions (see: Vue/React with computed properties, or any other frameworks doing things close to functional reactive programming), type inference (even Java is getting a var keyword!), more powerful type systems (things like the Typescripts of the world have) are now becoming trendy, but Haskell had them years and years ago.
The above is definitely oversimplifying (a short HN comment is no place to get into the fundamentals behind the various kinds of type systems), but I've found all the things I love in Haskell and other FP languages seem to slowly drift on over to other languages, albeit often a little suckier.
(I'm still waiting on software transactional memory to become mainstream, though. Of course, in languages that allow mutable state and without some way to specify a function has side effects, you're never gonna get quite as nice as Haskell. Oh well.)
I'd bet a lot of this has resulted from improvements in computation power. It used to be you couldn't afford to abstract your hardware away in a lot of real-world cases. Whereas now we can afford the programmer benefits of immutability, laziness, dynamic types, and first-class functions. Static things like var can probably be attributed to the same advancements happening on developers' workstations.
This is a good point which I hadn't thought of, but I think there's a lot more opportunity to bring concepts from FP to mainstream languages. For example, why don't imperative languages have an immutable keyword to make a class immutable, given how error-prone it is otherwise? https://kartick-log.blogspot.com/2017/03/languages-should-le...
Python has tons of functional features [1] while not being a purist FP by any means. This article liked to say quite often that "X would be impossible in Go or Java!" and I kept thinking, "I bet it's possible in Python, just not as academically wonderfully as you were hoping".
As it turns out, Python continues to be one of the top three languages in terms of popularity. It's not clear if this has helped feed a bigger userbase into purist FP languages though.
People are generally more willing to accept incremental changes than an entirely new way of doing things. For good reasons: they're skeptical, availability of talent, tools, libraries, IDEs, help if they run into trouble...
An analogy is the spread of yoga in the west the past decade or two, because it was easy to do so without changing your lifestyle. If Westerners were asked to fly to the Himalayas for a month to learn yoga, how many would have learnt yoga?