> See? That's exactly what I mean. How many businesses ran 8-bit software
> on apples or radio shack or whatever? How many mainframe programs were
> written in Haskell?

Well, since mainframes were more or less extinct by the time Haskell was 
invented, I'm going to say "not many".

Come to think about it, if you're going to judge "the best language" as 
being "the most widely used language", wouldn't that mean that Z80 
assembly wins by several thousand miles?

> If you're going to start counting the variants of BASIC that don't suck
> by your metric (e.g., VB.NET, VB6, etc) then I can guarantee there's
> orders of magnitude more production code in BASIC than Haskell. I can
> guarantee there's more demo code in BASIC than Haskell.

VB isn't BASIC. It's an entirely unrelated language that just happens to 
have a similar name and bares a vague resemblance to the syntax. Much 
like Java and JavaScript (oh, excuse me, ECMAScript) have nothing to do 
with each other.

Personally I greatly dislike VB, but there's little debate that it's 
more powerful than the original BASIC.

>> Excel macros, makefiles and shell scripts are all strictly more
>> powerful than BASIC in at least one objective way: they all support
>> recursion. BASIC does not.
>
> Makefiles don't support recursion except by invoking themselves
> externally.

What, a make target can't invoke itself? I thought it could.

> It's only relatively recently that shell script have
> supported recursion in the language itself.

Well... if you say so. I'm only commenting on the state of these 
languages today (because that's all I know about).

> Plus, when you're trying to solve a problem like building software,
> recursion is a point *against* your solution.

I disagree.

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