Haskell is Useless

• Start by laying out programming languages on useful<->useless, safe<->unsafe axes (where unsafe refers to side-effects)
• Most mainstream languages are imperative and end up in the useful, unsafe corner – they are very effectful.
• Real world gradually moving in the safe direction
  • Transactional memory: avoid doing arbitrary I/O during a transaction
  • Annotations of pure procedures that compilers can work with
  • LINQ
  • so sublanguages with controlled effects exist, but primarily within bigger languages
• Ideally, Haskell will also move toward being useful.
  • Attempting to combine effectful computations and safe computations into a single language in such a way that they don’t pollute each other.
• Cross-fertilizations between the useful and safe corners that currently seem so mutually exclusive