> How?

By "new" I didn't necessarily brand new. I meant something like Rust, Go, or Julia. They're more than 3 years old and relatively fully-baked, but they're much younger than the mainstream languages.

I don't know much about Julia, but in the Rust and Go communities, the early adopters are producing libraries for the not-so-early adopters. A good question would be, "Why?" I think the answers are: 1) fun, 2) because they want to get others to use the language, and 3) because their company has adopted the language in production.

So it does (and has to) happen. In this whole thread, I'm not talking about the decision-making process of an early adopter. I'm talking more about someone replacing a mainstream language in a production or business environment.

> "Easy to learn" in most contexts and for most people means "similar" or "familiar".

I meant "easy to learn" however you want to define that. Similar/familiar is fine, as it's definitely contributing to the popularity of Rust and Go. It really does hurt some excellent languages (e.g. OCaml) that they look so alien to mainstream, working programmers.

> My opinion is that it's their problem, not Haskell's

That's true. A language should have whatever syntax is most effective and not make the same mistakes that past languages made.

However, that's not the same thing as readability. A language can be totally different from C-family languages and still be readable. To mention OCaml again, I find it ridiculously hard to read because there are tiny, similar-looking characters that are significant all over the place. To my eye, significant dots and tildes are very hard to pick out when I'm scanning down a page.

So assuming Haskell is readable to a complete newbie, it isn't Haskell's problem that the syntax is new. But it is Haskell's problem if it can't overcome the catch-22 that people don't use a language if other people don't use it.

I'm glad we're talking about Haskell, because that community is very enthusiastic and has made some incredible, accessible Haskell resources to solve this problem. It may not be their problem, but they're still attacking it, as every language has to. It seems to me that the Rust community knows this and is going in the same direction with highly-accessible tutorials.

As for Go, the language is so small that it's "easy to learn" in terms of syntax, but the patterns and paradigms you use in Go might take longer as a result.