>> "Despite its distance from traditional programming, and its relative 
>> lack of common use, Haskell has become one of the most talked-about 
>> languages on the Internet."
>>
>> Um, WTF? No it hasn't!
> 
> Well, according to the statistics on www.langpop.org it has. More 
> talked-about than even C# or Ruby. And you can't argue about statistics, 
> can you? :P

Heh. Depends on how those statistics are collected. ;-)

 From what I've seen, Lisp, Earlang and Clean get *way* more publicity 
than little old Haskell. Even ML is more widely known.

(E.g., XKCD makes several references to Lisp and Python, but never once 
mentions Haskell.)

>> Who the hell has heard of Haskell?
> 
> Probably everyone who has ever visited povray.off-topic :P

Only after I heard about it. :-P

> Actually it seems to me that there's more discussion about Haskell here 
> than, for instance, PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl, Java, and possibly even C#.

Depends on whether you mean "discussion" and in people arguing about the 
merits of a given language, or "mention" as in people using its name. 
I'd say there is *a lot* more material written about C, C++, C#, Java, 
etc. than there is about Haskell. Whether they are "discussed" more is 
harder to quantify. Certainly Haskell's name is less widely heard.

> Though I guess the discussions we've seen here only serve the point that 
> whether a language is *talked* about is quite orthogonal to whether 
> people consider it any *relevant* :-P

And, indeed, being talked about is quite orthogonal to being *used*, 
much less being *useful*.

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