Aiming for Mainstream

Over on defmacro today, a new article appeared: defmacro – Why Exotic Languages Are Not Mainstream in which the author laments that while there appear to be various choices to use Haskell on Windows, it turns out that all of them are, in some way, not ready for prime time… or even for effective hobbiest use.

I’ve noticed this myself, in my last few forays in to esoteric languages: the illusion of plenty of choices, runs in the the reality of no good choices.  This is not a universal problem; I’ve had great results with Ruby, Python, and Lua, all of which are to some extent esoteric.  The thing that those languages have in common is that there is at least one (and generally, only one) robust, production grade implementation with a community actively supporting it.

If you want to see your favorite language gain acceptance, spend your time creating / maintaining / vigorously supporting a production-ready implementation.