&gt;<p>Alright, I&#x27;ll give you that there are a ton of GHC extensions after getting a list of them, all 106 as of GHC 7.10[0].<p>This does make me wonder why having so many extensions was never an issue for me.<p>&gt; The Haskell community really got its shit together over the last 3 years. Cabal got a lot better, a bunch of key libraries got good, our compiler is fixed some major bugs<p>Agreed.<p>&gt; I love Haskell, I really do. I wish I could ship more code with Haskell, and like it as well. But the OP asked about why Haskell didn&#x27;t take off. Its ecosystem was in what we might call a state of growth and flux at the time a lot of stream and batch computation systems were shipping.<p>Fair enough.<p>&gt; Oh and uh, I think Haskell&#x27;s community is full of some truly toxic people, an intersection of some of the ugliest and most arrogant personalities of the Scala world who&#x27;s primary education strategy can only be called &quot;negging.&quot;<p>I&#x27;ve seen this personality type in other languages, but not Haskell yet. I too abhor the &quot;negging&quot; type, as well as the subculture that term arose from.<p>0: all ghc extensions<p><pre><code>    OverlappingInstances	
    UndecidableInstances	
    IncoherentInstances	
    DoRec	
    RecursiveDo	
    ParallelListComp	
    MultiParamTypeClasses	
    MonomorphismRestriction	
    FunctionalDependencies	
    Rank2Types	
    RankNTypes	
    PolymorphicComponents	
    ExistentialQuantification	
    ScopedTypeVariables	
    PatternSignatures	
    ImplicitParams	
    FlexibleContexts	
    FlexibleInstances	
    EmptyDataDecls	
    CPP	
    KindSignatures	
    BangPatterns	
    TypeSynonymInstances	
    TemplateHaskell	
    ForeignFunctionInterface	
    Arrows	
    Generics	
    ImplicitPrelude	
    NamedFieldPuns	
    PatternGuards	
    GeneralizedNewtypeDeriving	
    ExtensibleRecords	
    RestrictedTypeSynonyms	
    HereDocuments	
    MagicHash	
    TypeFamilies	
    StandaloneDeriving	
    UnicodeSyntax	
    UnliftedFFITypes	
    InterruptibleFFI	
    CApiFFI	
    LiberalTypeSynonyms	
    TypeOperators	
    RecordWildCards	
    RecordPuns	 (Deprecated, use NamedFieldPuns instead)
    DisambiguateRecordFields	
    TraditionalRecordSyntax	
    OverloadedStrings	
    GADTs	
    GADTSyntax	
    MonoPatBinds	
    RelaxedPolyRec	
    ExtendedDefaultRules	
    UnboxedTuples	
    DeriveDataTypeable	
    DeriveGeneric	
    DefaultSignatures	
    InstanceSigs	
    ConstrainedClassMethods	
    PackageImports	
    ImpredicativeTypes	(deprecated)
    NewQualifiedOperators (deprecated)
    PostfixOperators	
    QuasiQuotes	
    TransformListComp	
    MonadComprehensions	
    ViewPatterns	
    XmlSyntax	
    RegularPatterns	
    TupleSections	
    GHCForeignImportPrim	
    NPlusKPatterns	
    DoAndIfThenElse	
    MultiWayIf	
    LambdaCase	
    RebindableSyntax	
    ExplicitForAll	
    DatatypeContexts	
    MonoLocalBinds	
    DeriveFunctor	
    DeriveTraversable	
    DeriveFoldable	
    NondecreasingIndentation	
    SafeImports	
    Safe	
    Trustworthy	
    Unsafe	
    ConstraintKinds	
    PolyKinds	
    DataKinds	
    ParallelArrays	
    RoleAnnotations	
    OverloadedLists	
    EmptyCase	
    AutoDeriveTypeable	
    NegativeLiterals	
    BinaryLiterals	
    NumDecimals	
    NullaryTypeClasses	
    ExplicitNamespaces	
    AllowAmbiguousTypes	
    JavaScriptFFI	
    PatternSynonyms	
    PartialTypeSignatures	
    NamedWildCards	
    DeriveAnyClass</code></pre>