Re:A couple of reasons: (Score 1)

Hello!

It was written, that functional languages seem to be significantly slower than e.g. C or other imperative languages.

That might be true. However, in a project here at work, we programmed a network line simulator (connect any number of BSD tun interfaces and/or Ethernet interfaces attached to with bpf, with routing and simulation of delay/loss characteristics).

As a test, we wrote a program in C, connecting two tun interfaces with no loss and no delay, and we configured the Haskell program to do the same. The performance loss was about 30%. And that, while the Haskell program is configurable and thus does things the C program did not do.

Compilation was with GHC, gcc 2.95.2 as backend compiler.

See Libraries and Tools for Haskell as a counterexample for the claim that there are virtually no tools. The only thing still missing is a CORBA binding. But that's not true for all "niche languages", e.g. Mercury, Erlang.

The struggles with non-imperative programming in first-term Haskell/Gofer/... courses is true - for those who have already experienced imperative programming and want to transfer that onto a FP language. Interestingly, people having had no programming experience at all had a less hard time!

Regards,

Hannah.