The funny thing about your comment is that you could have made the exact comment in 1995 to dismiss Java. Sometimes it just takes very long for ideas to reach mainstream, but they can nevertheless become extremely successful.
The most important innovation in the Hindley-Milner type system was parametric polymorphism, since that is the thing that enables you to build more powerful abstractions. Since the release of Java 1.5 and C# 2.0 that is now fully mainstream, but it took more than 25 years.
Boarding card reissue fee? It's been a few years since I've been on a Ryanair flight, but all the other airlines I've used recently have QR scanners now, you no longer need a boarding card to board a plane.
> The critique is 'Haskell takes FP to an extreme and I show this is true because someone tried to implement miniKanren and needed Oleg to do it'.
>That is not really a strong argument.
It's worse than that. The linked paper is about implementing minikanren as a monad transformer, which is a lot trickier than just porting it over, regardless of language. It's probably a lot easier in Haskell than in Scheme though.
Furthermore, if pure FP is useless, then monad transformers are useless too. But then the argument becomes "this useless thing is really tricky to implement in Haskell, therefore Haskell is useless". The only reason you would want Oleg's minikanren to be easy to implement is if you actually want pure FP. So the argument kind of negates itself.
If something seems scary/spectacular/surprising it's usually a good idea to do some fact checking. In this case it's very easy, since the authoritative source (Forbes) is available online.
The vast majority of OTC derivatives was far less disruptive to the banking sector than your average vanilla home mortgage loan during the crisis.
An overwhelming majority of all the banks that failed during the crisis had zero OTC derivatives on their books, but plenty of average vanilla home mortgage loans.
Internal documents from the banks that did deal in more sophisticated financial products show that they had a good understanding of how these products exposed them to risks in the home mortgage market, they just didn't think that housing prices would fall that much.
Despite all this, people like to blame OTC derivatives for the crisis rather than overconfidence in the housing market.
> I don't know but I assume that part of the reason that Swedes are able to deal effectively with the trash is that they sort it properly at the source, so that they more easily can process it.
Nope, you can burn unsorted garbage. The reason for sorting is so you can recycle materials instead of putting it in a incinerator.