I hang out on irc.freenode.net like many other programmers in the open source community. Lately, I’ve noticed that the #haskell channel has exceeded #rubyonrails in participation and “attendance”:

With all of the talk of parallelizing languages and multi-core processors lately, I think this can only be a good thing.

One of the things that gives me a lot of confidence in Haskell is the enormous academic brainshare invested in the language. My gut tells me we will be seeing a lot of innovation and stable, well-engineered programs coming from this area (i.e. more of the same, but at higher volume). It kind of reminds me of the Ruby community a few years back—there is a big emphasis on experimenting, playing, implementing new ideas, etc.

In other words, Haskell has matured to the point where I think it may have finally succeeded.