On Marketing Haskell
With respect to availability of talent pool: my alma mater used to teach Haskell as the introductory programming language, and from what I’ve heard from people who were around then it was great for faculty and students. However, a very large corporate donor pressured the university to switch to Java in the early 2000s, because that’s what they used internally and they wanted a large local supply of pre-trained fungible labor. Now only a small fraction of the top students who study advanced topics in PL or compilers or what-have-you will come out of the university knowing how to use Haskell. I think this is deeply unfortunate - if society could quantum tunnel through to the point where Haskell was the safe, readily hireable corporate choice, the state of software (especially corporate software) would be a lot better off.