I think it is or will be soon enough. The internet made communication between geographically disparate developers so much easier. It's become mature enough that there are sites now where curious developers can congregate and exchange ideas.
When I started in the field the internet wasn't on the radar of businesses. Email accounts were uncommon never mind blog sites. Most book stores didn't carry books on academic topics. Besides, the wave of OO was just starting to gather so 9 out of 10 books were on OO or C++ or both.
Developers are now exposed to more and can share code and techniques. More complex problems are shared now causing curious developers to stretch their limits.
The largest problem I see now with adoption of Haskell is the us/them mentality of field trained developers vs. academically trained ones. I'm in the former group. While not all academically trained developers code/design well, the median one has been exposed to a wider range of coding problems and tools. Our ability to share ideas and problems on the internet levels that playing field if we let it.
In short, yes, mainstream developers are ready for Haskell/Lisp/OCaml/etc. We need to get over the "that's just for academics" mentality. They are tools, thought out by people with lots of brains and time on their hands, to solve problems. The only thing holding us back is our mentality.
When I started in the field the internet wasn't on the radar of businesses. Email accounts were uncommon never mind blog sites. Most book stores didn't carry books on academic topics. Besides, the wave of OO was just starting to gather so 9 out of 10 books were on OO or C++ or both.
Developers are now exposed to more and can share code and techniques. More complex problems are shared now causing curious developers to stretch their limits.
The largest problem I see now with adoption of Haskell is the us/them mentality of field trained developers vs. academically trained ones. I'm in the former group. While not all academically trained developers code/design well, the median one has been exposed to a wider range of coding problems and tools. Our ability to share ideas and problems on the internet levels that playing field if we let it.
In short, yes, mainstream developers are ready for Haskell/Lisp/OCaml/etc. We need to get over the "that's just for academics" mentality. They are tools, thought out by people with lots of brains and time on their hands, to solve problems. The only thing holding us back is our mentality.