Many people are trying to influence those in their field. In Confessions Of A Used Programming Language Salesman (Getting The Masses Hooked On Haskell) Erik Meijer talks about his journey and how he achieved massive influence on mainstream programming.
For many years I had been fruitlessly trying to sell functional programming and Haskell to solve real world problems such as scripting and data-intensive three-tier distributed web applications. The lack of widespread adoption of Haskell is a real pity. Functional programming concepts are key to curing many of the headaches that plague the majority of programmers, who today are forced to use imperative languages. If the mountain won’t come to Mohammed, Mohammed must go to the mountain, and so I left academia to join industry. Instead of trying to convince imperative programmers to forget everything they already know and learn something completely new, I decided to infuse existing imperative object-oriented programming languages with functional programming features. As a result, functional programming has finally reached the masses, except that it is called Visual Basic 9 instead of Haskell 98.
Infiltration is the key! Obviously Erik is a very smart guy who has put in the hard yards and knows his stuff. However to achieve major impact required joining an influential organisation and working on the inside, rather than an external activist or confrontational approach.
The whole paper is worth reading, although a large portion is naturally Microsoft orientated on .NET language/CLR features. Below are just a few interesting quotes.
From section 5.2 Standard Query Operators
It is quite surprising that Haskell is one of the very few languages that allows higher-kinded type variables. If, on the term level, parametrizing over functions is useful, doing the same on the level of types sounds like an obvious thing to do. As far as we know Scala is the only other language besides Haskell that also support higher-kinded types.
From section 6.2.3 Contracts
The static type systems of most contemporary programming languages are actually not that expressive at all. They only allow developers to specify the most superficial aspects of the contract between caller and callee of their code.
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From a program-specification point of view, most programs are extremely dynamically typed!
It is a real shame Erik decided to join Microsoft rather than Sun or IBM. Although I guess he probably wouldn't have had the same level of influence on the JVM and associated languages.
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