Marketing based on comparing yourself with other brands is a poor strategy.
I’m not usually one to link to CEO speeches, but this one struck me: Best marketing strategy ever! Steve Jobs Think different / Crazy ones speech (with real subtitles) - YouTube
Never did apple tell you in one of their ads/campaigns why they’re better than Microsoft. Never did Nike talk how they’re better than Adidas. Instead, they sell an idea, a vision.
As for programming languages, I think there are two ideas that are worth to market and Haskell can do those:
- for the engineer: the conflict between expressivity and confidence
- for the manager: the conflict of aggressive iteration and keeping technical debt low
Engineers love high expressivity, but they will soon regret it if they lose confidence in the things they built. This happens with languages like C++ quickly, in my opinion. Soon you’ll need very disciplined engineers, so your project doesn’t derail and becomes unmaintainable.
Managers love the idea of iteration (agile is all over the industry) and yet they’re scared of technical debt for long-running projects as it’s slowly regressing productivity, burning out employees and requiring a rewrite down the line.
Haskell has a unique stand in both conflicts, IME.