“Conventional” is relative

I found this line from Software Foundations amusing:

… we can ask Coq to “extract,” from a Definition, a program in some other, more conventional, programming language (OCaml, Scheme, or Haskell) with a high-performance compiler.

Most programmers would hardly consider OCaml, Scheme, or Haskell “conventional” programming languages, but they are conventional relative to Coq. As the authors said, these languages are “more conventional,” not “conventional.”

I don’t mean to imply anything negative about OCaml, Scheme, or Haskell. They have their strengths—I briefly mentioned the advantages of Haskell just yesterday—but they’re odd birds from the perspective of the large majority of programmers who work in C-like languages.