This comment by nh2 (on Reddit) is my favourite response to that line of thinking. I recommend reading the whole thing. Excepts:
> You're not going to get any "credible empirical evidence" already because the sample size is so small. That would require getting, say, 100 companies that are similar in size and tasks, have a working business model and are still around, and also want to spend time on methotically collecting concrete evidence, and care to blog about that.
> people don't really want to spend time stating the obvious
> We don't spend time blogging that on our Haskell server, we get pretty much none of [run time type error or segfault] because well, those don't exist in Haskell
> We're convinced it's the best tool for the server job, compared to other tech we used at past jobs and projects. So we're using Haskell for it, and we started it in Haskell. We cannot compare before/after, because we directly started it in the "best tool available". We can compare our current project to our past individual work experience, but one cannot simply turn such individual cross-project experience into quantitative evidence
https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1plsmqh/comment/nt...
> You're not going to get any "credible empirical evidence" already because the sample size is so small. That would require getting, say, 100 companies that are similar in size and tasks, have a working business model and are still around, and also want to spend time on methotically collecting concrete evidence, and care to blog about that.
> people don't really want to spend time stating the obvious
> We don't spend time blogging that on our Haskell server, we get pretty much none of [run time type error or segfault] because well, those don't exist in Haskell
> We're convinced it's the best tool for the server job, compared to other tech we used at past jobs and projects. So we're using Haskell for it, and we started it in Haskell. We cannot compare before/after, because we directly started it in the "best tool available". We can compare our current project to our past individual work experience, but one cannot simply turn such individual cross-project experience into quantitative evidence
https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1plsmqh/comment/nt...