>It is an issue of the language's qualities if it does not really make it easier to reason about code.
The primary point of haskell is making it easier to reason about your code.
>I find reason to question the simplicity of something which is widely acknowledged to take a lot of time to learn, to be mind-bending, and which seems to be impossible to explain simply
It takes a long time to learn any programming language. You create an invalid comparison when you compare learning language X++ after already learning X to learning language Y++ without having learned language Y. Haskell only takes longer to learn if you compare it to learning a language that is virtually identical semantically to a language you already know. And I don't know why you think it is impossible to explain haskell simply, there's a reason everyone points to learnyouahaskell.com when people ask how to learn haskell.
>The virtues of survivors like C and LISP are not all "social issues".
How is lisp a "survivor" exactly? Haskell is more widely used than any lisp is.
The tiobe index has lisp in the top 20 (at 13th) while Haskell is at 33rd, so lisp is more popular than Haskell even though lisp is over a half century old. Being in the top twenty after 50 years looks like the very definition of "survivor" to me.
Lisp isn't a language, it is a whole bunch of languages. Lumping half a dozen languages together obviously moves it up the list. Being old is working in its favour, not against it. Older languages have more written about them purely because of the time they've existed. Pick a specific lisp and try your comparison again.
The primary point of haskell is making it easier to reason about your code.
>I find reason to question the simplicity of something which is widely acknowledged to take a lot of time to learn, to be mind-bending, and which seems to be impossible to explain simply
It takes a long time to learn any programming language. You create an invalid comparison when you compare learning language X++ after already learning X to learning language Y++ without having learned language Y. Haskell only takes longer to learn if you compare it to learning a language that is virtually identical semantically to a language you already know. And I don't know why you think it is impossible to explain haskell simply, there's a reason everyone points to learnyouahaskell.com when people ask how to learn haskell.
>The virtues of survivors like C and LISP are not all "social issues".
How is lisp a "survivor" exactly? Haskell is more widely used than any lisp is.