
Learn Haskell: Lesson 1: Hello, World! - charzom
http://learnhaskell.blogspot.com/2007/09/lesson-1-hello-world.html
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davidw
Beyond "stretching your mind", I need a compelling reason to learn Haskell. I
think that that marketing aspect of programming languages is something lots of
academics tend to forget about. Erlang, for instance, is far more interesting
because it clearly does a couple of things much better than the competition.
And indeed, I have been, and currently am paid to work on Erlang code.

It's not just "can you do real stuff with it?". Of course you can. The real
question is what exactly does it do that is _so_ much better than other
languages that there is a reason to learn a whole new language just to get
that thing.

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tuukkah
Pure functional programming (referential transparency everywhere) plus some
bleeding edge support for abstraction starting with type classes and monads.
Those are the features.

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davidw
Those are 'features' for computer scientists at universities. 'Features' for
working programmers are what those things might enable you to do.

