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I know a few programmers who keep talking about Haskell when they are among themselves, and here on SO everyone seems to love that language. Being good at Haskell seems somewhat like the hallmark of a genius programmer.
Can someone give a few Haskell examples that show why it is so elegant / superior?
The way it was pitched to me, and what I think is true after having worked on learning on Haskell for a month now, is the fact that functional programming twists your brain in interesting ways: it forces you to think about familiar problems in different ways: instead of loops, think in maps and folds and filters, etc. In general, if you have more than one perspective on a problem, it makes you better enabled to reason about this problem, and switch viewpoints as necessary.
The other really neat thing about Haskell is its type system. It’s strictly typed, but the type inference engine makes it feel like a Python program that magically tells you when you’ve done a stupid type-related mistake. Haskell’s error messages in this regard are somewhat lacking, but as you get more acquainted with the language you’ll say to yourself: this is what typing is supposed to be!