Comment by fat-chunk

When I first learned to program at university we were taught Haskell. That was 15 years ago and I've not really programmed anything in Haskell since, instead I've racked up years coding professionally in pretty much all the major imperative languages.

I'm aware of why Haskell is not practical as a production language for most companies, but I have to say I've never really coded in anything else that feels as "neat" and it's a shame. Every other language feels like it has some idiosyncratic scaffolding one has to learn, reminding you that you're constrained by how computer hardware works, rather than just expressing an algorithm in terms of inputs and outputs.

I would say it has made me a better coder, I've still kept a preference for keeping data immutable, copyable and abstracting complexity into easily testable functions over classes with unobservable mutable state.