Brief History of Haskell

I've always understood it to be literally the former, but at the same time tongue-in-cheek the latter.

I don't think so? The longer explanation is

> Haskell has a sort of unofficial slogan: avoid success at all costs. I think I mentioned this at a talk I gave about Haskell a few years back and it’s become sort of a little saying. When you become too well known, or too widely used and too successful (and certainly being adopted by Microsoft means such a thing), suddenly you can’t change anything anymore. You get caught and spend ages talking about things that have nothing to do with the research side of things. I’m primarily a programming language researcher, so the fact that Haskell has up to now been used for just university types has been ideal. Now it’s used a lot in industry but typically by people who are generally flexible, and they are a generally a self selected rather bright group. What that means is that we could change the language and they wouldn’t complain. Now, however, they’re starting to complain if their libraries don’t work, which means that we’re beginning to get caught in the trap of being too successful.

I read through it a long time ago, and it's fine for learning the core of the language. Real World Haskell and Learn You A Haskell For Great Good are probably better introductions nowadays.