> I think the tooling being not ideal is a reflection of how mature/serious the community is about non academic usage.
I'd say it's more of a reflection of how having a very big company funding the language is making a difference.
People like to link Haskell's situation to its academic origins, but in reality, most of the issues with the ecosystem are related to acute underfunding compared to mainstream languages.
One doesn't happen without the other. Haskell is hugely influential with it's ideas and impact. But commercially it never really took off. Stuff like that needs to come from within the community; it's never going to come from the outside.
> Stuff like that needs to come from within the community
Either the community is large enough for it, or it comes from the sponsoring company.
Few languages start off by being in the first situation. The first example that comes to my mind (Python), well... Tooling was a long and painful road. And if the language hadn't been used/backed by many prominent companies, I don't see how man-hours would have flowed into tooling.
Python is a good example. Guido van Rossum was an academic when he built python. And then later he got employed to work on Python because indeed a lot of people found his work useful. By the time that happened, python was already quite widely used though.
Also time wise it's a good example because python emerged early nineties around the same time the Haskell community started forming. Haskell had a few years head start actually.
The difference was that python became popular quite early in things like Linux distributions and even though Haskell was available and similarly easy to install in those, it never really caught on. Sponsored development usually happens as a result of people finding uses for a language, not before.
I'd say it's more of a reflection of how having a very big company funding the language is making a difference.
People like to link Haskell's situation to its academic origins, but in reality, most of the issues with the ecosystem are related to acute underfunding compared to mainstream languages.