The craft's "hardest problems" are tackled with C or C++ (embedded and real time stuff) or with R, Python, Fortran, Matlab (scientific stuff). Some of the most used and therefore most scalable systems on the web use Java, PHP (and variations of PHP), C#.
None of those languages strike me as being both elegant and state of the art at the same time.
Meanwhile the "weapons for a civilized time" such as Lisp or Haskell haven't really gotten a major hold in either a Fortune 1000 company or the software giants on the West Coast.
It's like there's no correlation between "hacker points" for a programming language and the actual results delivered with that language! I'm being ironic, there isn't any. I'm open to someone proving me wrong though...
Well, you usually don't choose languages based on their technical merits, but rather on the ecosystems around them. These depend on popularity which you get by having traction, which you get by being quickly productive. This is why very tolerant or very familiar languages succeed. Being chosen as one of the blessed languages that are taught in universities is also, of course, priceless. A killer framework (Hello, Ruby) can also do wonders.
Not that this defends the very poor syntactical choices that Lisp and Haskell and their communities have done (minimal grammar is not a good thing! One-symbol names are horrible!), but a lack of popularity is not as damning as it sounds.
> Well, you usually don't choose languages based on their technical merits, but rather on the ecosystems around them
Ecosystem is part of technical merit, but I'd agree that in many cases (particularly non-software firms), languages aren't chosen by technical merit (including ecosystem), but for social reasons.
I can't bet for everything, but a lot of sophistication has been put into making Fortran, C, and Java very fast and efficient, for different but meaningful values of "efficient". They are very sharp tools, if not most elegant.
> Meanwhile the "weapons for a civilized time" such as Lisp or Haskell haven't really gotten a major hold in either a Fortune 1000 company or the software giants on the West Coast.
Last I checked, the list of publicly acknowledged production Haskell uses included several significant ones in Fortune 1000 firms, and various Lisps have seen production use at major firms, both inside and outside the software industry.
Sure, Haskell and Lisp (and APL and any other language you care to mention) is used somewhere, in some Fortune 1000 company, but that's a far cry from having gotten a major hold. Just because a group of futures traders in one HSBC office use Haskell to price a certain type of future you cannot really say the Haskell has a major hold at HSBC.
Upvoted because it absolutely is elitist and dismissive - it's a fair cop!
To pedantically respond to your question, note that what i said was that master programmers "won't be choosing it as their tool of choice", by which i mean that it won't be the language they dream about being able to use on their next project. Of course, if Go is the right tool for the job, a sensible and honest programmer will use it.
