
Clean Programming Language: the insanely great, the weird and the short-sighted - nreece
http://fpmatters.blogspot.com/2009/04/clean-programming-language-insanely.html
======
eelco
He's forgetting one important thing. Compared to other functional languages
Clean has virtually no community. That said, the things they (the language
developers) can build are pretty impressive. Their iTasks workflow system
(unfortunately there is only a very old web page online, but I've seen a
recent demo at a conference) is very cool.

~~~
trjordan
This has always struck me as kind of strange.

Many, if not all, languages are defined in large part by their communities.
Java is for the unwashed masses, Ruby is undisciplined, monkey-patching
lunatics, Haskell is friendly, brilliant, and (for the most part) ignored. It
almost seems like languages are just touchstones around which to build a
community (by writing libraries, frameworks, etc.). The differences between
the actual languages seem much less important that the idioms within the
languages.

(For the record: I know Python, MATLAB, Lisp, and Java.)

~~~
plinkplonk
"languages are defined in large part by their communities"

For the longest time, Clean wasn't open sourced. _These days_ , the chances of
a non open source language gathering a strong community around it is hard
(except maybe for Microsoft languages), and even when a community forms, it is
likely to remain small. I for one, would never put my time in to a community
around a closed source language.

~~~
Tamerlin
I don't think that Microsoft is an exception to that, actually. C# didn't
really start gaining popularity until AFTER ECMA ratified it as an open
standard (same for the .NET platform and the CLR).

