The reason I find Haskell interesting is precisely that it's the only place I know where the theoretically-minded and the practically-minded get together and interpollinate. Everywhere else the one group pretty much just sneers at the other. If it doesn't always go 100% smoothly in Haskell-land, well, it's not as if we collectively have a lot of practice in getting along across that boundary.
Consequently, Haskell is one of the few places where any interesting progress is being made in the field of programming. The pure theoreticals continue spinning off into ever-more-rarified lands of type theory that are already all but impossible to use in practice, and the practicals are stuck shuffling around the same things over and over again in the same basic languages they've had since the late 1990s, just with a few more fancier curlicues added. (Every once in a while they'll import an idea from the academic side, but not without pretending they came up with it on their own while still sneering at the very thought that maybe if one thing was useful from over there, other things might be useful too....)
(Rust may someday also be an exception, though I'm currently unsure whether Rust's community will make progress in the general field of programming, or whether they'll make Rust-specific progress. A certain amount of Rust-specific progress is required either way before we can tell.)
Very insightful comment, thanks. I've never thought of things that way before. I guess the practice/theory intersection explains what I find so appealing about Haskell.
Consequently, Haskell is one of the few places where any interesting progress is being made in the field of programming. The pure theoreticals continue spinning off into ever-more-rarified lands of type theory that are already all but impossible to use in practice, and the practicals are stuck shuffling around the same things over and over again in the same basic languages they've had since the late 1990s, just with a few more fancier curlicues added. (Every once in a while they'll import an idea from the academic side, but not without pretending they came up with it on their own while still sneering at the very thought that maybe if one thing was useful from over there, other things might be useful too....)
(Rust may someday also be an exception, though I'm currently unsure whether Rust's community will make progress in the general field of programming, or whether they'll make Rust-specific progress. A certain amount of Rust-specific progress is required either way before we can tell.)