There's another "real drug" hidden in the subtext of your post and Semantic's post, right in between
"Sure new code might have bugs, and deep semantic changes to code can break anything..."
and
"Its language features allow concise, correct, and elegant expression of the data structures and algorithms we work with."
- the notion that fundamental abstractions (not just the ones someboy thought up like the Gang of Four) compose well. This is something that we've seen the industry slowly migrating towards in the form of functional JS flavors like typescript and purescript, Java's lambdas, Scala's Cats and so on.
The ability to refactor and as importantly be confident that your refactor is not messing with the semantics of anything upstream is a hidden feature of static types applied to expressive abstractions.
So far, I have only seen this achieved with Haskell's libraries, type system, and reliance on fundamental mathematical concepts while also being able to avoid any "there's something rotten in Denmark" moments. The content in the Hackage ecosystem is a wonder of the modern programming world, warts and all.
There are many rough edges to the development process, as always, but at least in Haskell you can limit the language's contributions to that edgeset. It actually makes you want to produce good code and be a better developer as a result!
"Sure new code might have bugs, and deep semantic changes to code can break anything..."
and
"Its language features allow concise, correct, and elegant expression of the data structures and algorithms we work with."
- the notion that fundamental abstractions (not just the ones someboy thought up like the Gang of Four) compose well. This is something that we've seen the industry slowly migrating towards in the form of functional JS flavors like typescript and purescript, Java's lambdas, Scala's Cats and so on.
The ability to refactor and as importantly be confident that your refactor is not messing with the semantics of anything upstream is a hidden feature of static types applied to expressive abstractions.
So far, I have only seen this achieved with Haskell's libraries, type system, and reliance on fundamental mathematical concepts while also being able to avoid any "there's something rotten in Denmark" moments. The content in the Hackage ecosystem is a wonder of the modern programming world, warts and all.
There are many rough edges to the development process, as always, but at least in Haskell you can limit the language's contributions to that edgeset. It actually makes you want to produce good code and be a better developer as a result!