This is not terribly surprising. The concepts behind the static type system of ML - from back the late 70s - are still "groundbreaking" for industry programmers. Virtual machine-based languages and automated memory management were done several times over, but they were only taken seriously after being massively marketed through Java.
I know a certain Unix junkie. She has chosen to stick to the old standbys of C and Perl. She doesn't want to even look at revision control yet - "too complicated" she says. Fortunately, this is just a hobby right now and she isn't going out and doing commercial work in such a state, but if someone who ostensibly is enjoying themselves programming isn't willing to go out and play with languages and tools, I doubt the situation is much better for a commercially-driven developer.
As long as our development environments are perpetually being replaced by new ones, I think it will be an uphill battle to get the research tech to the mainstream. New environments are almost always crude and barebones. By the time they're mature, people are already starting to move on to the next one. We can only hope for some stability in the future; at that point, the dynamics of programming may take a major turn for the better.
I know a certain Unix junkie. She has chosen to stick to the old standbys of C and Perl. She doesn't want to even look at revision control yet - "too complicated" she says. Fortunately, this is just a hobby right now and she isn't going out and doing commercial work in such a state, but if someone who ostensibly is enjoying themselves programming isn't willing to go out and play with languages and tools, I doubt the situation is much better for a commercially-driven developer.
As long as our development environments are perpetually being replaced by new ones, I think it will be an uphill battle to get the research tech to the mainstream. New environments are almost always crude and barebones. By the time they're mature, people are already starting to move on to the next one. We can only hope for some stability in the future; at that point, the dynamics of programming may take a major turn for the better.