> In what sense was this not a victory for Haskell at the time the paper was written? You can always decompose any programming language L into a collection of X, Y, Z features and claim it's really about X, Y, Z instead of L, but is that a meaningful distinction?

It was the exclusion of a handful of popular languages that either strongly intersected with Haskell of the era (SML), or had other measurable contributions to make to prototyping capability (smalltalk, erlang, prolog). Including SML at the very least, would have let us know whether Haskell's laziness was a help or a hindrance, and including smalltalk would have helped us to know whether C++'s failings had to do with its reliance on OOP or something else (even in 94, C++ was one of the largest and most complex languages that had ever existed). But they weren't even on the table...a baffling decision given some of the languages that did make it in. It looks like a deliberate bias in language selection, and it makes it look like the conclusion was drawn before the study even began.