https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2020/02/28/language-rankings-1-2...
https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/06/18/language-rankings-1-2...
I think of languages as falling in roughly 3 popularity buckets:
1. A dominant conservative choice. These are ones you never have to justify to your CTO, the "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" languages. That's Java, Python, etc.
2. A well-known but deliberate choice. These are the languages where there is enough ecosystem and knowledge to be able to justify choosing them, but where doing so still feels like a deliberate engineering choice with some trade-offs and risk. Or languages where they are a dominant choice in one domain but less so in others. Ruby, Scala, Swift, Kotlin.
3. Everything else. These are the ones you'd have to fight to use professionally. They are either new and innovative or old and dying.
In 2020, Haskell was close to Kotlin, Rust, and Dart. They were in the 3rd bucket but their vector pointed towards the second. In 2025, Kotlin and Dart have pulled ahead into the second bucket, but Haskell is moving in the other direction. It's behind Perl, and Perl itself is not exactly doing great.
None of this is to say that Haskell is a bad language. There are many wonderful languages that aren't widely used. Popularity is hard and hinges on many extrinsic factors more than the merits of the language itself. Otherwise JavaScript wouldn't be at the top of the list.
> It's behind Perl, and Perl itself is not exactly doing great.
Your comment reminded me of gamers who "play games" by watching "letsplay" videos on youtube.
Mind you, I know and like Haskell, but its issues are highly tied to the failure of the simple haskell initiative (also the dreadful state of its tooling).
There is also some popular user facing software like Pandoc, written in Haskell. And companies using it internally.
I thought for a while I'd be able to focus on getting jobs that liked haskell. it never happened.
Also, I've found Haskell appropriate for some one-off tasks over the years, e.g.
- Extracting a load of cross-referenced data from a huge XML file. I tried a few of our "common" languages/systems, but they all ran out of memory. Haskell let me quickly write something efficient-enough. Not sure if that's ever been used since (if so then it's definitely tech debt).
- Testing a new system matched certain behaviours of the system it was replacing. This was a one-person task, and was thrown away once the old system was replaced; so no tech debt. In fact, this was at a PHP shop :)
this is plain and unsubstantiated FUD
> Haskell has none after 30 years
> I know Haskell
I doubt it
